You don’t have to be a Philistine to have questions about the Naperville Culture Fund. The most basic question is still being debated a year after the Naperville City Council created it - what is the Culture Fund? Since it’s inception one thing has been certain, it is a one percent food and beverage tax on restaurants - to the tune of $2.4 million in the first year - and the City Council gets to disperse it.
Beyond that interested observers had “culture” to go on and vague references to funding being available for “social and artistic events and entities.” It is a recipe for misuse. Councilman John Rosonova, a critic of the fund, asked the right question and derived the wrong lesson when he expressed concern last Monday about a proposed position to administer the Culture Fund, saying, “I don’t understand why this is going to cost us a $65,000 position. I just don’t see it and I was concerned about this when the food and beverage tax was created and the culture fund implemented. This is a lesson in how government grows” [Daily Herald, May 24]
The problem is simple. Define the need and then address it - or as DuPage Forest Preserve Commissioner Joseph Cantore has said in a similar context, “You’ve got to know what you want before you ask for the money, guys.” The City Council, rightly enamored of the idea of supporting culture in Naperville, never defined just what they were doing. It permitted council members like Dick Furstenau (a KidsMatter trustee) to suggest, likely with the best of intent, in a November 2004 KidsMatter Trustee Meeting, that the social service agency should apply for a grant from the Culture Fund (they later did for $55,000 for staffing and other uses). After all, KidsMatter is a “social entity” that does charitable work.
Where Councilman Rosonova gets it wrong is in the lesson. It’s not about “government growth” - it’s about sensible, smart government growth when it’s justified. The lesson is know what reason you have for spending money and plan before you tax. First, see if you need to tax at all. Then, if you do need to tax to achieve worthwhile goals, invest the tax money wisely into programs that will yield the greatest return for the public’s investment. A focused, well-administered cultural fund program can enrich Naperville residents and those of surrounding communities at the same time that it can add to restaurant and other business receipts, more than paying back the tax in increased business and future tax collection that might result in city budget surpluses. These in turn can lead to tax reductions and/or other worthwhile community investments without new taxes. But that’s only if the purpose and plan are well thought out - and well run.
Recent Naperville City Council Candidate Matt Freeman spoke to me about the Culture Fund during his spring 2005 campaign, saying how poorly planned it was - and how much better the money could be spent. He suggested that an arts center could be built with some of the money to provide a permanent cultural structure for the community, and a place that would readily attract people to Naperville and its businesses. The City Council should have considered innovative ideas like this, and made clear judgments about where the money would be spent to yield the greatest bang for the buck before they started to tax businesses (and residents, for whom the tax is passed along) in an ill-defined program.
What happens if it’s not well thought out and well run? Well, then it’s an additional tax with the potential for waste, the ability to create ill will and possibly to increase cynicism about our local government. Brand Bobosky, president of a public art project group, Century Walk, had this to say a couple days ago:
“The disappointment I’ve expressed before is that there are no real parameters as to how they’re going to [disperse the funding]” [Daily Herald, May 23].
Some may say this is sour grapes, but do not forget that part of the new tax funding replaces about $675,000 in property tax money from the city’s general revenue - money that previously went to fund cultural events. What happens with the Culture Fund is not all about “new money” - a third of it was “existing” cultural funding.
As for the new tax money and old, taxpayers and cultural organizations have a right to expect clear principles and rules for why and how the money will be distributed to maximize the value derived from our tax investment in the city. Anything less is, in this case, a cultural deficit that hurts everyone in Naperville. As Tim West of Suburban Chicago Newspapers recently showed, cynicism about the fund being used for ‘non-cultural’ events can make it seem like the “Cultural Fund” should be ‘renamed.’ He suggests “the ‘we’re going to spend this on any old thing we want, just like we do the rest of your tax money’ fund.” We can do better with Naperville taxpayers’ money than that - and we should.
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