Future city funding of arts council in question

Springfield Regional Arts Council Executive Director Leslie Forrester says she was taken by surprise with a mid-May phone call from Mayor Jeff Schrag informing her that there would be no city funding for her organization after fiscal year 2027.

“To say I was disappointed is an understatement,” Forrester said.

What was a distressing call for Forrester had a different feel for Schrag, who said in an interview that his goal was to be proactive in the year leading up to the next city budget. The early notice that the city would not provide future allocations to the arts council would provide a chance for the organization to strategize, according to Schrag, and he wanted to help.

“I reached out to Leslie Forrester with an idea of trying to solve long-term problems in their funding needs for operations,” Schrag said.

The mayor has only one vote among the nine members of Springfield City Council who approve each annual budget, a process that takes roughly half a year, starting in December and culminating in a June vote. 

In the upcoming city budget for fiscal 2027, passed June 9 and going into effect July 1, the city provides $100,000 in funding to the arts council. It came to light during council discussions that a planned $100,000 appropriation for the arts council was inadvertently left out of the current fiscal 2026 budget, and that was a problem Councilmember Brandon Jenson sought to remedy through the use of carryover funds in a March 9 council meeting.

On the table was the issue of how to use just over $1 million in fiscal year 2025 carryover funds. Jenson made a motion to allocate $100,000 of carryover funds to the arts council, deducting the funds from a proposed $507,000 allocation for future construction of a municipal court building.

Jenson explained at the time that funding used to be provided to the arts council by the Springfield-Greene County Parks Board, but the decision was made to eliminate that money from the parks budget prior to the fiscal 2026 budget.

Director of Parks Ron Schneider told SBJ in an interview that park board funding appears to be less fluid than it once was.

“I started in the summer of 2024, and financial issues became apparent as we were developing our budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year,” he said. “We had to make some tough decisions.”

One of those decisions was to eliminate the arts council funding the parks board had provided for three years. The parks board also targeted nonrenewal of other expiring agreements, like an $85,000 equestrian position for the Greene County Sheriff’s Office and a Greene County staff position at River Bluff Cave.

“I would say perhaps at the time when the parks department had more money and was a little bit more fluid, they were able to fund some of these things that were not core services for the parks,” he said.

For the upcoming year, with the parks looking at a $1.5 million shortfall for operating expenses, it’s a time for belt-tightening and a focus on maintenance of properties and safety, Schneider said.

The parks fund is an enterprise fund that does not receive general fund support from the city, he noted.

Changing picture
Forrester provided the breakdown: In fiscal 2023, the parks board provided roughly $89,000 to the arts council, followed by parks allocations of $91,000 in 2024 and $92,000 in 2025. From 2012 to 2022, the city supported a staff position at the arts council, she said.

Jenson said in the March meeting that he assumed the park-provided funds would be taken over by the city. 

“It had been my understanding that we would be transitioning those costs to the city,” he said. “For whatever reason – some miscommunication – it appears that that was not included in last year’s budget.”

Jenson said during the meeting that City Council understands the value of arts.

“The arts create a pretty significant economic impact in our community,” he said, adding that changes in local funding added to potential cuts to arts programs at the state and federal levels paint a dangerous picture for the continuation of arts in the community.

Jenson said during the meeting that he worked with the city manager’s office to develop the proposal for one-time funding while officials examine the budget to find an ongoing source of revenue to support the arts council. He said the city is still several million dollars away from being able to fund construction of a new municipal court building, and the funds are sitting in an investment account until the city is ready to pull the trigger on moving that project forward.

“The pretty dire outlook for financing for the arts community and specifically Springfield Regional Arts Council, this seems like a good idea as a one-time investment to ensure that we’re supporting an existing operation and an existing program, giving staff another year to look at a sustainable ongoing source of funding,” he said.

The arts council budget for fiscal 2026 shows total expenses, minus grantmaking for arts organizations, at just shy of $813,000, with $369,000 of that going toward personnel expenses – and roughly 60% of personnel funds are programmatic, Forrester told SBJ.

“Even though this funding was discontinued through parks due to their funding constraints, we had been in conversations with city staff to see funding continue within another department, like Workforce and Economic Vitality,” Forrester said. “We were on the path to see funding continue at a reduced level, and I really thought it was likely to move forward.”

Forrester added that she learned late in the game of the decision not to fund the arts council in the current fiscal year, fiscal 2026, which ends June 30.

“The decision not to include the funding for the SRAC in the city budget for FY2026 was abrupt and not communicated until the budget was already passed,” she said.

For Schrag, a key part of the conversation is to be the lodging tax that funds arts in the city. Voters approved a 5% tax on lodging, including short-term rentals, in 2023 to fund arts, sports tourism and Visit Springfield, Missouri. In the ballot measure, 4.5% of the tax funds were to be dedicated to support of arts and culture, with another 4.5% going toward attraction and hosting of sporting events. Travel and tourism promotion received 47% of tax funds, with the balance of funds generated going to debt service on existing bonds purchased under the city’s prior lodging tax, according to past SBJ reporting.

The first full year of collection of the 4.5% lodging tax for arts and culture, 2025, brought in $332,887, Forrester said, and $220,000 of the funds, or roughly two-thirds, was used for grantmaking for arts organizations in the city.

Schrag said the arts council needs to consider using tax proceeds not for grantmaking but to support its own operations.

“That’s solid year-in, year-out funding, and it’s growing,” he said.

Schrag said he understands the pressures faced by organizations, and he added that the city faces pressures as well.

“COVID was a time of nearly limitless government spending,” he said. “That’s coming to an end.”

Additionally, the city received more requests for funding in the next budget than it was able to support through general fund revenue, he said.

City spokesperson Cora Scott offered context.

“During this year’s budget development process, city departments submitted requests that far exceeded the amount of projected available revenue,” she said. “As is the case each year, City Council and city leadership were required to make difficult decisions and prioritize among many worthy needs, balancing requests for public safety, infrastructure, parks, housing initiatives, economic development and community services against limited available resources.”

An April presentation to council by City Finance Director David Holtmann said city departments had submitted $40 million in budget requests for fiscal 2027, including ongoing needs of $14.7 million that included 90 new positions and one-time needs of $25.3 million. The budget he presented provided only $1.2 million in ongoing funding and $828,000 for one-time needs, meaning only 5% of department requests for additional funds were granted. The budget projected a 4.8% increase in general fund revenues for the upcoming budget year.

These are the pressures that led Schrag to call Forrester, he said.

“My goal was to try to offer solutions – to work toward long-term solutions as we move forward,” he said. “That’s how I approach the office. I don’t shy away from telling people, ‘I don’t see this working. Let’s explore something else.’”

Other arts support
Schrag said the city offers strong support for the arts.

“The city of Springfield funds the (Springfield) Art Museum mightily,” he said, noting the city provides more than $2 million per year to support museum operations. “That’s what we can afford to do, and it’s a positive, valuable contribution to the arts.”

The Springfield Art Museum has also been promised a $30 million allocation of funding from the Spring Forward SGF half-cent tax through fiscal 2028. That money will go toward the museum’s $77 million facility renovation and expansion.

Forrester emphasized that while the art museum does important work, its mission is very different than the arts council’s. 

“We fill the gaps,” Forrester said during a June 16 appearance at SBJ’s People You Need to Know live interview series. “We want the organizations that are the pros, like the Art Museum and the theater and the ballet, to be able to support their work and be very mission-driven.”

She stressed that the arts council serves an important function for economic development locally, particularly as the state and federal governments cut funding for the arts.

“Our job is to sort of be that economic development organization for the arts community,” she said. “We want to drum up business; we want to drum up awareness. But we also help infuse that community with more cash through our grant-making. That’s really important. We need more capital to invest in these communities.”

She said without support from public partners, the arts council has less money to invest in the arts community, and no other organization is granting funds at that scale.

“If you look at any size city of ours, most of those will have some kind of office of cultural affairs,” she said. 

The arts council serves that function, she said.

“The arts council’s role is to be that go-to support for the city, in all of the different ways,” she said. “We’re filling a role that the city cannot do or does not have the capacity to do, and I think it’s unfair to certainly pit the art museum against the rest of the community because we’re all in this together.”

Forrester called that thinking a false equation.

“What about ‘yes-and?’” she said. “There’s more to the story.”

SRAC is currently finalizing a cultural plan – the arts equivalent of the city’s Forward SGF comprehensive plan, put together with the input of more than 1,000 members of the community.

“Springfield deserves more – we deserve more – so we should expect more from our community,” she said.

She added that the arts council is made up of arts advocates.

“We are here on behalf of the arts community, and we’re not always the greatest at, you know, ‘Look at us – look at what we’re doing.’”

What the arts council is doing is ultimately what the entire arts community is doing, Forrester noted.

The arts council also operates The Creamery Arts Center. It houses the arts council and several arts organizations. The council also runs a pair of festivals, ArtsFest in the spring and Cider Days in the fall, with an agreement announced June 15 to take on administration of Cider Days from the Downtown Springfield Association.

The most recent economic impact study by the arts council, released in 2023, showed that the local arts economy tallied $89 million in expenditures the previous year.

“The arts council’s job isn’t necessarily to produce art,” Forrester said in an interview. “It’s to fill gaps where those things aren’t happening and make sure the arts community is whole.”