By Mary Voelz Chandler

Friday is the 2009 Arts Advocacy Day in Colorado, and that means the cultural faithful will troop up to the State Capitol to lobby legislators about the importance of arts funding to both the economy and our societal well-being. And it is important: more than 180,000 Colorado residents work in creative fields.

Then arts advocates will meet at 11:30 a.m. March 6 at the Denver Art Museum’s Ponti Building to talk more about funding issues. Finally, the Colorado Council on the Arts will gather at 1:30 p.m. in the DAM’s Hamilton Building for a regular quarterly meeting.

One word runs through all three events, and that would be money. The only natural response is: Good luck, and join the club.

The council has postponed its deadline to receive applications for the program that takes the biggest chunk of the budget: Grants to Artists and Organizations last year totaled about $1.3 million of the Council’s $1.6 million in state gambling money (the agency also gets another $700,000-plus from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not surprisingly, this year of financial freefall is quite different. Council executive director Elaine Mariner believes her agency will face a 25% cut in that state money, as recommended by the legislature. (That’s down from the 50% cut in Gov. Bill Ritter’s proposed budget-balancing plan, and the original 70% cut recommended by the Joint Budget Committee staff.)

On the other hand, the council expects to receive $314,100 from the NEA because the agency has $50 million in stimulus money to parcel out to state arts agencies and nonprofit institutions for projects that focus on the preservation of jobs in the arts. Mariner says the council must get its application in to the NEA by March 13 (non-profits have til April 2). That $314,100 is more than 50% percent higher than the council expected.

So is this a wash? For now? What about the future, as every state in the nation is facing an uncertain economy?

Obviously, this is all happening at the speed of light, in terms of the federal disbursement and guidelines for grants. For more detail on an incredibly detailed operation, go to www.nea.gov or www.arts.gov.

I think it is great that the new administration has considered the cultural community as workers who pay taxes, pay rent, buy food and vote.

Part of me thinks the NEA is the only way such stimulus money can be distributed; it is the alleged cultural voice of our government. But the endowment has lost some credibility over the years, ever since it stopped funding individual artists and went adrift over the culture wars of the early 1990s.

Plus, $50 million out of more than $770 billion? The arts should be considered in every project being pondered as part of a recovery, from bridges to education. The legacy of the New Deal’s cultural programs still rings true.

A call for a culture czar has come from some quarters, but that makes me nervous, too: This country is so polarized, with so many people afraid of adventure in the arts, what happens from administration to administration? I don’t want to wake up some day and find that the national art czar has a collection of bronze sculptures of little girls carrying sunflowers.

This is part of the conversation that should happen Friday. Well, maybe in a couple of Fridays. It’s panic time right now, when the state arts council must decide how it wants to apportion the money from the NEA to save jobs.

I’ll take that as a step to acknowledge that cultural concerns are as important as any other aspect of our government.

Contact me at ChandlerRMN@hotmail.com.