City cultural task force eyes financial help for performing arts venues

September 23, 2005 - By MICHAEL LAFLEUR, Lowell Sun Staff

LOWELL -- If Mayor Armand Mercier's Task Force on Cultural Assets has its way, Lowell's financially strapped performing-arts venues, galleries and museums could soon get a much-needed fiscal boost.

City Councilor Eileen Donoghue is chairman of the 20-member task force, which had its first meeting Wednesday morning at City Hall.

Mercier said he hopes the group -- which also includes City Councilor Bill Martin and representatives of the arts, banking and Southeast Asian communities, in addition to city, Lowell National Historical Park, Middlesex Community College, UMass Lowell and Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau officials -- will be able to present a plan to the new City Council in January.

He said he hopes councilors will incorporate those recommendations into their budget deliberations for the next fiscal year, which will begin in July.

"I consider this to be a very important component of Lowell's success," Mercier said. "It's so important as an economic engine of the city."

Donoghue noted that while manufacturing companies long ago fled New England, the city's cultural institutions offer an opportunity to bring hundreds of jobs and visitors with disposable income.

"One of the things we'd like to avoid, going forward ... is always putting out fires," she said. "We as a city have to ensure there's a viability, a sustainability in place."

The key to that sustainability, of course, is money.

Among the focuses of the task force will be identifying potential funding sources to support the groups -- outside of the property-tax levy -- as well as gathering information on the needs out there.

One idea, floated by Donoghue, was levying a 1 percent surcharge on redevelopment projects in the downtown historic district -- where more than $80 million worth of work has gotten under way since 2003 and an estimated $53 million in developments are planned within the next few years, not including any projects in the Hamilton Canal District, the tab of which could top $100 million.

Also discussed was adding a small fee to tickets for Lowell Spinners baseball games at LeLacheur Park or concerts at the Tsongas Arena, money that would support cultural institutions, and mandating that city redevelopment plans for the Hamilton Canal District include low-cost housing designated for artists.

Nothing discussed Wednesday will necessarily be included in the group's final report, and Jim Cook, executive director of the Lowell Development and Finance Corp., a local banking collaborative, stressed that the task force is not designed to focus solely on augmenting organizations' annual operating budgets.

"Funding operating budgets can be an incredible sinkhole that you never can get out of," he said. "That may be one thing we look at, but over all, there is going to be a much broader strategy."

The task force's next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 3 at 7:30 a.m., in the mayor's reception room at City Hall.