No! To Cigarette Tax For Arts
By Roldo Bartimole
To help artists and arts organizations why didn’t the always-eager tax devotees at Cuyahoga County Commission find a tax we might all cheer? Maybe even cast a “Yes” vote.
For example, a tax on lawyers, especially the big legal firms. You know, the ones that sit on the major non-profits, including arts organizations.
On the other hand, maybe a special surtax on incomes of $100,000 or more, which righteously would include many top arts executives and the foundation leaders and politicians who back the cigarette tax for the arts. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Another tax on cigarettes, however, seems to be picking on the same people repeatedly and unnecessarily. The Three Stooge Commissioners and the proponents took the easy way out.
The cost to consumers will be $20 million a year at 30 cents a pack for 10 years.
Amazingly, that is a heavier tax than the cigarette tax levied for Gateway. The arts smoking tax would raise $200 million in 10 years.
During the 15 years of cigarette taxes for Gateway, smokers paid $80,358,035 in extra taxes. (More actually, because they paid the regular sales tax atop the sin tax.) Since August of 2005, smokers have paid an additional $3,654,122 to support Browns Stadium.
So the Three Stooges are asking even more from smokers than they did for Gateway.
This cigarette sales tax comes out of the pockets of primarily – if the statistics are true about who are smokers – working class and poor families and THEIR CHILDREN.
So when State Sen. Eric Fingerhut, Shaker Heights Democrat and director of the campaign, talks about the “real, documental costs to smoking,” apparently he doesn’t take into account what the extra cost means to low income families.
Fingerhut doesn’t have to worry. He makes some $56,000 a year as a state legislator and another $60,000 as a “consultant” to the Center for Community Solutions, a social agency that works, according to its web site to “identify health, social and economic challenges facing Greater Cleveland.”
Fingerhut should note that the organization of which he’s a consultant wants “to target resources toward sound, cost-effective solutions.” I’d think that taxes on cigarettes then, by Fingerhut’s consultancy, would be best used to fight nicotine addiction, particularly among the young.
The tax won’t bother Tom Schorgl, another lead supporter of the tax and head of Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, which gave $50,000 to the failed attempt at a property tax for the arts. Schorgl is paid $157,500 salary with $18,120 more for benefits.
Going after smokers again is wrong - and boring. It’s been tried once too often. It’s another sales tax on those least able to afford it. Unfortunately, it represents the tax mentality of our local Democratic political and Republican civic leaders.
There are other questions, too.
How much do the three County Stooges – Tim Hagan, Jimmy Dimora and Peter Lawson Jones - already give to arts organizations?
In May, the County awarded $446,787 to arts organizations, including $45,000 to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Another $500,000 every year goes to the Playhouse Square Foundation. (See below.) And who knows how much more.
Will the Commissioners use what is saved on arts funding - if this tax passes - to feed their favorite pastime: hiring friends and relatives and friends of relatives and relatives of friends?
We also don’t know which art institutions will get the bulk of the money though there will be limits. However, the larger the operating budget, the larger the possible subsidy.
Big arts organizations, with big executive salaries, are going to get the larger shares.
I especially mean those with hefty assets and high salaries.
Maybe they are needy, but needy to the extent of taking money from low-income county residents? No.
For example, are we to help the Playhouse Square Foundation (PSF) where Art Falco, president, earns an annual $369,804 with benefits of $67,735 and expenses of $6,970? (All the income figures herein are from 2004, the latest IRS figures available.) Five other PSF executives make more than $100,000 and 21 others more than $50,000.
Playhouse Square has net assets or fund balances at the end of June 2004 of $56.9 million. It also has two taxable subsidiaries, one minor and the Playhouse Square Holdings worth $33.3 million upon which it lost $825,421. This includes the highly tax subsidized and tax-abated Wyndham Hotel property in which the public expended millions of dollars in subsidies.
The County owns the Lowe’s building and each year taxpayers pay $500,000 to support maintenance of the building, according to Lee Trotter, deputy county administrator. This deal goes until 2032. That suggests County residents will pay another 26 years, or another $13-million. County taxpayers also paid $680,000 to purchase the building in 1997, which houses two PSF theaters and the backstage operation.
Alternatively, the Cleveland Orchestra, which operates under the Musical Arts Association (MAA) last reported $171 million in net assets or fund balances.
The orchestra, rated one of the best in the nation, if not world, is a worthy institution to support, as are many of the arts institutions.
However, should smokers be responsible for the slightly more than $1 million a year paid to Franz Welser-Most, its music director? Or salaries as high as $200,000 (three) and $300,000 (one) for musicians?
The MAA paid its departing executive director Thomas Morns $655,836 AND added another $694,198 to his retirement plan in 2004.
Should ordinary citizens be subsidizing such costs with regressive sales taxes?
Aren’t there better uses for public funds, especially in the city named the most impoverished in the nation two of the last three years?
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) had assets and fund balances of $742-million. Katherine Lee Reid, recently retired director, was paid $240,500 and scored another $29,720 for her retirement benefit in 2004.
One understands that the three major institutions are important for Cleveland. The Orchestra, for example, got some help with $28 million in bond funds via the state’s economic development unit for its renovation. All three of those cultural organizations have received tax supported help in the multi-millions of dollars for their buildings.
They also receive some operating funding already from Cuyahoga County and from the State of Ohio.
The Ohio Arts Council, (http://www.oac.state.oh.us/aboutOAC/default.asp) a state agency, has allocated slightly more than $2 million for Cleveland arts groups for 2007. You can look at its web site to find out how the money is being divided among 57 Cleveland arts organizations. It also separately gives individual arts grants.
Among the large benefactors are the Cleveland Museum of Art $400,341; Musical Arts Association (Orchestra) $399,133; and Playhouse Square Foundation, $399,700.
These figures seem to be annual donations, though declining, by Ohio to arts organizations. In 2002, for example, Ohio gave $535,563 to CMA. Playhouse Square got $533,673; and the MAA received $535,919. In 2003, the CMA got $487,970; Playhouse Square $487,626; the MAA, $488,280.
That’s a more reasonable manner to fund arts organizations since it comes from at least somewhat progressive state taxation.
A sales tax, however, whether on candy or cigarettes is onerous.
Time to get real in Cleveland. With population down and descending, with jobs disappearing and never to return, with incomes declining and vanishing, why would one propose new taxes that weigh most heavily upon ordinary working people?
Lack of imagination? No, lack of resolve to do what is right but difficult.
Fortunately and unfortunately, this community has too many institutions to be encouraging even more than we have.
When I came to Cleveland in 1965, the population was a robust 875,000. Now, some 40 years later it is measly 415,000 and heading south.
We have essentially the same infrastructure to be maintained with half the people and more poor to support it. We probably have more arts organizations than in 1965 and we’re being told we have to maintain them.
It has come time for Cleveland to assess what it can afford and what it cannot afford.
If you lost your job, should you go buy fancy new clothing and new furniture and think that is a solution because it makes you feel better?
I don’t think so.
Cleveland’s past wealth has become a heavy burden. Maybe the answer is that the remainder of that past wealth – its foundations – will have to take up more of the arts burden.
(Disclosures: I don’t smoke. My son is a lawyer. My wife is a CMA retiree. My daughter is an artist.)
$30 Million to Further Screw up a Game
Is anyone surprised that the new Cavs owners want money to “spruce up” the Q (Gund) Arena? What’s $30 million to improve an arena only some dozen years in use?
A $30 million request, soon after the team vamoosed Cleveland for Independence for a new practice facility.
On the day it was announced that Cleveland once again assumed the crown of the American city with the most poverty, the Plain Dealer reported that three port authorities, including, of course, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, would help finance the new Cleveland Cavalier practice facility in Independence. Cheap tax-free bonding from the public.
Keep it up, guys and we’ll be the most impoverished city in the world with major league sports and art institutions, but little else.
Weren’t you surprised though that the Plain Dealer editorially slapped it down? Good for the PD.
Do you ever expect the takers to stop taking? That’s all they know how to do.
How can people fail to identify what’s wrong with this community?
Cleveland would have been better off in the 1990s without the Indians and the Cavaliers because they’ll be leaving anyway. We should have said, bye, bye, then. Have a good time.
Instead, people believed the costly bullshit about Renaissance and Comeback City. Never was. Never will it happen.
I guess owner Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans (doesn’t that name give you chills?), figured that he got LeBron James to stay here another three years so that should have been worth $30 million to us suckers.
Gilbert, after all, paid the Gunds $375 million for the Cavaliers. George & Gordon Gund had paid a big $20 million to good ole Ted Stepien for the team. Quite a jump in inflation, don’t you know, from a $20 to $375 million price tag.
One reason given for the $30 million is to make the arena more suitable for entertainment. Isn’t that what the basketball game and LeBron are supposed to be about?
Actually, it isn’t. You go to major league sports games these days and the owners blare crap out at you so much that you need to put your fingers into your ears. They want to sell you stuff. They want to stuff ads into your eyes and ears. They televise the game to you even if you’re in the stadium or arena.
They’ve pretty much taken the game out of the game anyway. Therefore, the $30 million will not be to improve the game for the fans at all. It will be to jazz (really deform) up the atmosphere and call it entertainment.
However, our community leaders once again feel it necessary to support this nonsense with tax dollars.
Thanks, Cleveland Port boss/Developer/Lawyer/Politician John Carney.
Republican 2008 Convention Belongs in Tampa
Seeing and hearing Democratic political officials foaming at the mouth for the Republican National Convention in 2008 makes me sick.
Hard to believe a no-nonsense Mayor Frank Jackson would join the ranks of ass-kissing County Democrats begging Republicans to use Cleveland for its convention.
This Republican Party in a short time has ruined America. It should be shunned in every manner until perceived as the menace to the world the Bush administration and Republican Congress really represents.
To invite and hardily host it for a few bucks is a disgusting display of the most vile, selfish greed.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATadelphia.net (:divend:)