It’s been a tough year for Taproot Theatre. Rent, production materials, and the price of fair labor are up, and, despite Artistic Director Karen Lund’s best efforts to compensate by slashing hours, positions have been left vacant. Cutting one of the theater’s three big shows a year hasn’t been enough either, with audiences still lagging 19% behind what they were before the pandemic. Like so many theaters, Lund says, they’re spending more and making less.

“Life went on while the theaters shut down, and we came back and are living four years behind everybody,” she says. “In a one-year, two-year period, we probably had five years of attrition.”

Doubling the price of tickets and hoping audiences would return en masse is pure fantasy. Lund reasoned that theatergoers living in this expensive city might be budgeting for rent and groceries, or saving their limited entertainment budget for streaming services instead. And then there’s the inevitable changes: After four years, some of the theater’s dedicated patrons simply aged out of night driving.

It came to a head late last year when Taproot realized it couldn’t pay for the 2024 season. They invested in hope, launching a $1.95 million “tiered emergency funding campaign.” Through grants, corporate sponsorships, and individual donations, Taproot has made more than 66% of its goal. Lund is confident they’re going to make it, but she’s an optimist.

Taproot isn’t alone. Look at the local art scene and this story begins to repeat itself, beginning with the initial shock of COVID and ending with empty-ish bank accounts and, sometimes, hard decisions.

In April, theater and community film center Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) cut nearly half its staff. In June, Scarecrow Video, the movie rental store turned nationally known nonprofit film library, made a 1.8-million-dollar plea to the public: Revenue was down 40% since 2015, payroll and rent were up 25%, and the shop could close at the end of the year. In July, Book-It Repertory Theatre staged its last show after 33 years.

And then, early this September, the Bellevue Arts Museum closed its doors to the public and entered into a receivership, a process to make creditors whole. At this point, there’s no telling how that ends. The museum could emerge as something new, or it could dutifully sell its assets.

Although there is no doubt the pandemic made money matters worse for the arts sector, particularly for large performing arts organizations with high overheads, it was vulnerable to begin with. Few organizations were rolling in it and, due to perennially slim profit margins, many productions represent hours and hours of hard work for low pay, and in many cases, the free labor of passionate volunteers. Many organizations depend on the goodwill of donors, and nonprofits have worried about a decline in charitable donations for years. 

While some arts organizations have thrived despite these meta problems, cultural spaces of all kinds have been affected, from independent galleries and art house theaters to museums and music venues. 

It sounds bleak. But the residents of King County have been constructing a life raft, now bobbing on the horizon.

Surprise! It’s a big bag of money! The county is calling its new fund Doors Open, and it’s a cultural access program funded by a 0.1% increase in sales tax (one penny on every $10 spent, adding up to about $40 a year per family) to support the arts, as well as heritage, science, and historical preservation nonprofits in King County, through 2031.

The relatively small tax hike reaps a huge prize. County funding for arts and culture will jump $48 million this year and up to $100 million next year.

4Culture, the county’s cultural funding agency, will oversee the program and the purse strings. And the equity questions. And the hard work of processing the applications. Of the near 700 organizations eligible for funding, nearly all of them—more than 600—have applied. 4Culture will announce the recipients in December and start doling reimbursement funding out in January.

Taproot, Scarecrow, and hundreds of others are eagerly awaiting.

“[The need’s] been persistent during my entire 20-year career,” says Brian Carter, 4Culture’s executive director. “There’s just a thin blanket of support, especially with a large area like King County. There’s just so many organizations.”

How to Move $100 Million

Though the timing is good, the Doors Open fund isn’t a reaction to COVID. It’s the product of more than a decade of pressure from groups like Cultural Access Washington and the Washington State Arts Alliance (which eventually merged to create Inspire Washington) on the Legislature to increase funding for the arts. Their hard work paid off when legislators finally took action in 2015, passing a law that allowed any city or county in Washington State to issue ballot measures asking taxpayers to foot the bill.

King County made its first attempt in 2017 with Proposition 1, but it failed at the ballot box. It succeeded in 2023 after the Legislature changed the rules: Voters be damned, now cities and counties can create cultural access programs by a committee or council vote. Seeing their opening, the King County Council did just that in December, voting 9–0 to create Doors Open. 

Small sales tax increases are not the ideal solution to anything. The regressive tax places an equal financial burden on unequal pocketbooks to fund the same service ($40 is couch change to some and a lifeline for another). But the county has considered equity in other ways. Doors Open sets aside more money for organizations that serve marginalized people, including veterans and homeless people; at least 10% must go to historically marginalized communities. And to ensure Seattle doesn’t take the pot, at least 25% of the money must go to other parts of the county. 

Now comes the work of figuring out where the money goes. “We don’t throw the names in a hat and pick them out,” Carter says.

To start with, it’s more complicated than tossing stacks from one big bag of money. It’s actually two big bags of money, “Sustained Support” and “Doors Open Facilities.” Sustained Support provides a year of unrestricted funding to meet an arts organization’s day-to-day needs, as long as they’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit, have at least a three-year history, and have some record of artistic or cultural accomplishments (heritage, cultural, and science organizations have their own requirements).

The $24 million Facilities fund was reserved for organizations building, buying, and remodeling physical spaces—pricey projects beyond the scope of fixing flickering lights and leaky plumbing. It’s divided into four separate funding levels. At the lowest, the county will pay the full cost of projects up to $250,000, and at the highest, the county will pay $2.5 million to projects over $10 million.

Carter couldn’t give a hard number, but he expects between 40 and 50 people will handle each application before it’s approved. After the September 4 application deadline, 4Culture’s program managers began sifting through the applications, passing eligible ones to peer review panels of artists and art administrators. Those panels send their recommendations to one of five advisory committees, organized by discipline, and they forward their chosen applications to 4Culture’s Board of Directors—a body that includes appointees from each King County Council member and the County Executive—for final approval. 

Next year, 4Culture will further divide the tax money into four additional programs: “Public School Cultural Access” to address gaps in K-12 education, “County Connected” to foster collaboration between organizations in different cities, “Launch” for new and emerging organizations, and “Public Free Access” to reduce or eliminate ticket fees for underserved communities.

It Takes Money to Make Money

Talk of funding the arts tends to get a little woo-woo. People focus on the intangible pleasures of art, like watching live theater or viewing a beautiful painting, which is nice, but it also gives conservatives the room to argue that government arts spending is frivolous.

But make no mistake—the county is betting their fund for the arts will be a literal investment, not a figurative one. The arts are a proven economic engine. In 2022, arts and culture nonprofits in the United States generated $151.7 billion of economic activity and $29 billion in taxes. That same year, the feds gave the National Endowment for the Arts only $180 million, a smaller percentage of the budget than the US allocated during the Reagan years. 

For inspiration, the county looked to Tacoma and Denver. Decades ahead of any city in Washington, Denver approved a sales-tax-based cultural access program at a time when the city was in an economic crisis that threatened museums and galleries. Examining tight budgets for someplace to cut, the eyes of the city and state fell on funding for major institutions like the art museum, the zoo, and the botanic gardens. Instead, their trustees emerged with the idea for the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD), a seven-county, voter-supported tax district to fund the arts in metro Denver.

That same year, Deborah Jordy was a pregnant soon-to-be mother, afraid she’d lose her assistant curatorial job at the art museum. But her world grew with the fund. Today, she’s SCFD’s executive director and responsible for funding 300 organizations with $84 million in public funds. Their grants span from $500 to $12 million, she says. “So, yeah, it’s real money.”

It became a sort of preview of what sustained local arts funding can do over time. When COVID hit, Jordy says SCFD helped the local arts scene remain stable. She says only four small organizations fell, and two of those collapsed because they succumbed to “founder’s syndrome”—when founders retire without a succession plan. 

Additionally, public dollars tend to incentivize public engagement and access. There’s the money to fund free trips to the Denver Botanic Gardens from assisted living facilities and schools, as well as free programs like the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot,” which is exactly what it sounds like—they park, jump out, and start performing Shakespeare. And she says the regional funding also inspires a spirit of regional collaboration between organizations big and small, and it brings artistic experiences to people where they live and work. And because so many arts organizations spend more of their budget to keep the lights on, public investment invites artists to take risks.

In November 2018, Tacoma voters became the first to take advantage of the change in state law when they approved Tacoma Creates. Its first full funding cycle was in 2020–2021, and it could not have come at a better, if not chaotic, time. 

In the last four years, annual city funding for arts, culture, science, and heritage organizations in Tacoma increased by $5 million a year, adding to the annual $200,000 in arts funding from the city’s general fund. Program manager Lisa Jaret says that that money helped stabilize arts organizations and support the local economy. Economic impact studies show that the average person who attends an artistic event doesn’t just spend money on admission; they also pay for parking, a hotel, dinner down the street, or childcare.  

A study by Americans for the Arts found that people who traveled to Tacoma for an arts event spent, on average, $34 dollars outside the cost of admission. In 2022, the arts stimulated the local economy to the tune of $163 million. When compared with American cities of between 100,000 to 249,000 people, Tacoma generates nearly five times the median tax revenue from the arts and more than five times the direct expenditures.  

Slices of the Cake

Certainly, money sounds good, but taken as a whole, $100 million a year isn’t that much money. Imagine it as a tiered wedding cake, decorated with red roses and piped garlands of buttercream frosting, resting uncut on a silver platter. 

Even from the back of the long line (in this analogy, you’re a plus-one and unimportant), the cake appears enormous. It looms, even. You wonder how you’ll finish the enormous slice you’re sure to receive. But when you arrive, the caterer hands you a sliver on a small plate, and you’re reminded how quickly hundreds of people can reduce a cake to crumbs and smudges of frosting. 

Money is not cake (it’s better), but like hungry wedding guests, more than 600 organizations are already queued up. When you add the total budgets from all the eligible museums, galleries, venues, studios, science centers, and heritage organizations, the sum equals $1.5 billion. Carter says he could not speculate on how many of them will receive funding and how much money individual organizations might get. 

But to employ another cake-based analogy: Doors Open funding is not frosting. It’s the eggs, meaning that A) the flour, sugar, and butter must come from someplace else and B) it’s not a replacement for other funds.

Arts organizations cobble their income together from a litany of funding sources. In Seattle, organizations can apply for private money, solicit donations, launch fundraisers, go for federal grants, state grants, and money from the City. Through a municipal admissions tax, the Office of Arts & Culture supports the local arts economy.

There is concern in the arts community that our municipal leaders may see Doors Open funding as an opportunity to chip away at the City’s projected $240 million deficit by cutting local arts support. Earlier this year, Inspire Washington and the Seattle Arts Commission solicited nearly 400 letters from supporters asking city leaders to retain 100% of the admissions tax for arts and culture.

Later this month, Mayor Bruce Harrell will unveil his proposed budget. I asked if he was considering cutting arts funding, and his office sent a statement dodging the specific budget question but affirming his commitment to championing arts causes.

In the Thick of It

It’s been less than six months since Derek Edamura laid off five people at Northwest Film Forum—enough time to stop a hemorrhaging financial wound, come to a relatively stable position, and begin to see the faintest signs of recovery. Re-hiring is not on the table in the short term, but if everything goes “ideally,” they’ll bring back two to three jobs in as many years.

The day we spoke, Edamura’s major—and still unfinished—task was to finish his application for Doors Open. He’s hopeful that they could be looking at a sizable increase in county support, but he’s tempering his expectations and not counting on a drastic improvement to their financial situation. He trusted 4Culture to do the right thing but expects inevitable mistakes from a new program with a condensed application process. 

“There is a lot of intention right now to disperse the money in equitable ways,” he says. “But until we see the outcomes, until we see how all of this makes it to the community, I think we should all be a little bit hesitant, and we should all be willing to hold these institutions accountable for dispersing these funds.”

After years of financial instability, Bellevue Arts Museum closed its doors to the public on September 4, which was ironically the application deadline for Doors Open. Executive Director Kate Casprowiak Scher even met with 4Culture to see if BAM could access the fund early. To the last, she had every intention of applying.

Kate Barr, executive director of Scarecrow Video, says the “proof will be in the pudding,” but based on conservative estimates, Scarecrow could receive five times of what they get from the county—enough to make up a chunk of dried-up federal CARES Act dollars. It gives her a lot of hope.

“You just hear week after week, month after month: This place has closed its doors, or this place is on the verge of closing its doors,” she says. “And whether they’re for-profit or nonprofit, I think the arts community has really, really been struggling. ...This could be that thing that helps us turn a corner and revitalize all of that again.”