CLEVELAND — Recently, the board of the Assembly for Action, the 501(c)(4) sister organization of the local nonprofit Assembly for the Arts, voted to pause activity on an issue campaign to renew funding for Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. As board chair, I share many of the concerns of my fellow board members.

Nevertheless, I am writing this guest column to express my personal point of view, because I feel that the arts community of Greater Cleveland is at a crossroads.

The global pandemic damaged the arts more than any other sector of the economy, and many institutions and creative professionals are still struggling to recover. Despite this catastrophe, our community has come to appreciate the importance of the arts to our local economy as never before. Research recently released by the largest arts and culture institutions and by the Americans for the Arts nonprofit in collaboration with the Assembly for the Arts shows that the arts and culture sector is one of Cleveland’s major industries, contributing over $533 million to the economy. Of course, its contribution to the reputation and quality of life of the region gives Cleveland a real competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, at a time when support for the health of the arts could not be more important and more needed, a key source of public funding is threatened. Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, a government subdivision set up over 15 years ago to distribute revenue from a cigarette tax to arts and culture nonprofits, is losing the confidence and trust of the sector it serves.

The cigarette tax that supports arts and culture in Cuyahoga County has had a transformational effect on the arts sector in and around Cleveland. Since 2007, the 30-cents-per-pack tax has distributed $230 million to arts nonprofits, stabilizing and strengthening this vitally important part of our economy and civic life. That’s why I was an enthusiastic part of the lobbying campaign in Columbus to renew the permissive authority for the tax in 2015. I served as a member of the steering committee that led the successful effort to approve the tax at the ballot box by Cuyahoga County voters.

Although supporting arts and culture through a cigarette tax may be counterintuitive, it has had a remarkably positive effect on the health of our community. Smoking has dropped dramatically in our county, saving lives and health care costs.

The unfortunate side effect is that revenue for public funding for the arts has declined by 50% and is still falling. As founding board chair of the Assembly for the Arts, the new arts advocacy nonprofit for our community, I was part of the team that led the difficult but successful effort to lobby for new legislation in Columbus that renews the permissive authority for the cigarette tax, allowing for an increase.

The voters of Cuyahoga County will again have the opportunity to continue this tax before the current tax expires on Jan. 1, 2027. A renewed cigarette tax will restore some of the lost funding and buy the community time to find more sustainable ways to support the arts ecosystem.

To bring this issue successfully to the voters, the Assembly for Action, allied with the Assembly for the Arts, must raise over $1.5 million for a ballot campaign and organize grassroots support.

Unfortunately, I cannot see a path for successfully launching this campaign, given the current atmosphere of confusion and mistrust in Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (CAC). Dissatisfaction with CAC management of these critical taxpayer dollars (currently about $12 million in revenue annually) has been building in all corners of the artistic community for years.

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture is a government subdivision created by Ohio statute for one purpose only: to equitably and transparently distribute public funds raised by the cigarette tax to qualifying arts nonprofits serving the community. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens with government bureaucracies, CAC has drifted away from its original purpose and mission and has taken on activities that are more typical of a charitable foundation, such as: evaluating and choosing projects and institutions for funding based on subjective judgments of value to the community; engaging in marketing and public relations activities; and developing proactive programs of its own that duplicate work of the existing efforts of organizations it is supposed to support. This mission drift has created rifts in the artistic community and has diverted dollars away from the public mission to pay instead for unneeded staff and overhead costs. While the revenue that supports it has dropped by over 50% — and while CAC is letting many of its grantees know that in the coming two-year cycle, their grant support will drop as much as 20% — their own budget is untouched.

Considering that CAC exists to support nonprofits that have undergone an existential financial crisis caused by the pandemic and have made agonizingly tough decisions to survive, CAC’s refusal to make similar adjustments to its costs is unconscionable. A return by CAC to its original mission would reduce its overhead costs substantially and return hundreds of thousands of public dollars to its intended purpose every year.

Similarly, CAC’s policy decisions have been notably tone-deaf. For years, there have been loud calls for more support for individual artists. By law, CAC can’t distribute dollars to individuals, but it can do this through well-qualified 501(c)(3) organizations that can regrant these dollars to individual artists. The racial reckoning of the past several years has underlined the need to help individual artists and creative professionals build sustainable careers to create a new pipeline of leadership. But CAC’s response to this need has been clumsy and ineffective. Years have gone by, and support for this segment of the community has not increased. CAC’s failure to act during the worst crisis to strike individual artists in our history leaves many frustrated and betrayed.

Nonprofits who get precious general operating support dollars from the tobacco tax rely on CAC to be a transparent and predictable partner, helping them to plan their budgets and react to the financial pressures that have been so destructive in recent years. Instead, CAC’s communications regarding its allocation process and policies have been inconsistent and opaque. The staff of CAC has stubbornly resisted calls by its stakeholders to consider new solutions and react to market conditions.

Despite the crisis of the pandemic and drastically declining revenues going to its grantees, CAC staff is budgeting millions of dollars in reserve to continue operations for one “extra” year should the cigarette tax not be renewed. These dollars should instead be front-loaded to protect arts institutions from steep revenue declines in the coming year and maximize their value, which otherwise will be eroded by inflation and the cost of maintaining CAC staff for an unneeded extra full year.

Of course, it is critical to renew this vital source of public funding. Its loss would be catastrophic to the community. Public funding for the arts has been a policy triumph for Cuyahoga County for the past 16 years. Much has changed in the arts landscape since then. The board and leadership of CAC must respond to the new realities and expectations of their stakeholders. They must prove that they are prudent stewards of precious public funds. Until then, the campaign to renew the tax is in doubt.

Polling results commissioned by the Assembly for the Arts show that public support for continuing this tax is high. But voters support this not because they back Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Most don’t even know what CAC is. They will vote for this because they value the work that artists and arts organizations do to make this community better.

When CAC returns to it original mission to serve the arts community with clarity and transparency, providing funding to arts organizations that empowers them to fulfill their own missions, I know the community will strongly rally to support this vital source of public funding.

Fred Bidwell is a philanthropist and arts entrepreneur. He is the executive director of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

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