L.A. Festival’s Grant Drastically Reduced

One of the biggest surprises among the 1991-92 Cultural Affairs grants: the Los Angeles Festival will get only $35,000 of the $150,000 it sought from the city to help fund this year’s planning for the next festival.

Already troubled financially, the festival plummets from being one of the city’s top grant awardees to 11th place. In 1990, the city department awarded the festival a total of $104,000. In 1989, the festival was given a grant of $100,000.

Michael Alexander, one of the six-member panel of artists and arts professionals who set the grant amounts in the interdisciplinary arts category, said the festival received a smaller award because funding a 1993 event was seen as less immediate than funding organizations that produce work continually.

“We were dealing with a number of the leadership organizations in the city, and looking at a festival in 1993--there was just a difference in the urgency,” said Alexander, artistic director of Metropolitan Structures West and a former Cultural Affairs administrator. “We wanted to fund groups that are actively involved in programming and would be getting money into artists’ hands right away.”

Alexander also said that the festival’s troubled financial status was not a factor in the city grant. “It was definitely not a case of kicking a dog while it was down,” Alexander said, referring also to another financially struggling organization, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, which was given $42,000.

What effect the smaller grant will have on ’91 festival planning efforts, budgeted at $874,000 according to the grant application, is unknown.

Festival officials have repeatedly refused to discuss financial details with The Times. They say that they are awaiting a financial report from a pending audit and don’t want to discuss finances until more planning is completed for the 1993 festival, which will emphasize the arts of Africa and the Middle East.

Maureen Kindel, festival spokeswoman and board chairwoman, did not return phone calls regarding the Cultural Affairs grant, nor did she respond to a list of written questions.

The smaller-than-expected Cultural Affairs grant comes at a time when festival organizers are not only raising funds to cover 1991 costs and trying to plan the 1993 festival, but are also apparently struggling to pay off remaining bills for the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, which was well received for its wide-ranging multicultural presentation last September.

As previously reported by The Times, festival staffers have told city officials that their lingering deficit was still $500,000 months after the three-week event, billed as a $5-million arts extravaganza, ended. In recent months, however, the festival lowered its deficit to around $200,000, thanks mainly to a $300,000 grant from the Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen International.

Cultural Affairs has given the festival substantial funds in previous years, when it ranked as one of the top three grantees, behind the L.A. Philharmonic and L.A. Music Center Opera.

For 1991, the festival has dropped to tie as the 11th highest grantee--a ranking it shares with the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, Arts Inc. and Visual Communications. In the interdisciplinary arts category alone, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and LACE all received larger grants than the festival.