Dear Cultural and Community Leaders,

Thank you for your participation at the first budget hearing.  We had a great number of articulate and passionate spokespersons from the arts community delivering very compelling messages.

However, I remain very concerned about the proposed 10% reduction to the general funds that support our grants budget.  We need your continued help as we enter the final stretch: these days leading up to this Thursday’s final budget hearing are critically important.

We must stay focused, committed and visible now and for this final round culminating on Thursday, September 22nd, at 5:00 pm in the County Commission Chamber. Please continue to contact County Commissioners starting today – and once again, make every effort to attend the 2nd public budget hearing and speak to the Commission. Your message should include thanking them for their support and asking for full restoration of our grants budget.

Please go to the Arts Action Alliance at http://artsactionalliance.wordpress.com/ for the contact list for County Commissioners, a sample advocacy message and our fact sheet. Do not delay in contacting Commissioners – many decisions about the budget will be worked out early this week and your voices can make the difference.

I hope to see you this week at the Budget Hearing. Thanks again for all your help.

Adolfo

• WRITE. Personalize and send e-mails, faxes and letters to every County Commissioner and the Mayor (sample message attached).
• CALL. Call every key County official, thank them for their support and emphasize specifically how important County arts support is to you and/or your cultural organization (County contact list attached).
• TESTIFY. Attend and register there to speak at the two upcoming County Commission Budget Hearings where the County’s budget will be discussed and finalized for the coming year.  The two Budget Hearings are being held at 5:01 pm on Thursday, September 8 and Thursday September 22 in the County Commission Chamber, 111 N.W. 1st Street, 2nd Floor. Crowds are expected so get there early and be prepared to wait to make your case (a fact sheet with important information about the impact of our cultural community is attached); you will have two minutes to speak.

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Dear Colleagues,

Yesterday, Mayor Carlos Gimenez released the County’s proposed budget for FY 2011-2012. For our Department of Cultural Affairs, this budget recommends a 10% reduction in General Fund (i.e., property tax) support to all of our competitive grants programs for the coming year.

Mayor Gimenez had two weeks since being elected to develop a budget that would find “ways to cut property taxes while preserving essential services.” One of the highlights in the Mayor’s budget message was the commitment to continue to fund cultural grants. We are grateful that Mayor Gimenez recognizes that the arts and culture are fundamental to our economy and to the well-being of our community’s families and children.

As you know, significant changes are occurring at County government and we must all remain ready to advocate on behalf of public investments in the arts. Over the coming weeks, we will be providing you with more information on what this budget means to our grants programs and services.

It is important to emphasize that this is the beginning of the public deliberations on the County’s budget. Next week, the County Commission meets to establish the preliminary property tax rates for next year. The budget is then finalized in two public hearings on Thursday, September 8 and Thursday, September 22, both at 5:00 pm in the County Commission Chamber.

I continue to appreciate all of your hard work to make this a great community and for your continued support to help us maintain our essential County cultural funding.

Adolfo
Adolfo Henriques
Chairman, Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council

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• Carlos A. Gimenez was elected as Miami-Dade County’s Mayor on June 28, 2011.
• Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez was sworn into office on July 1, 2011.
• Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez presented the Proposed FY 2011-2012 County Budget on Wednesday, July 13.

Click here to learn more about Mayor Gimenez.

Image from ricitizensforarts.org

From our friends at the Florida Cultural Alliance:

Please Show Up,  Step Up, and Speak Out for Arts, Arts Education, & Culture.

Please Register and Participate in One or More 2011 Advocacy Days for Arts & Culture Advocates!

Florida Tourism Day — March 22 in Tallahassee
Arts & Culture Day — March 23 in Tallahassee
Arts Days in D.C. — April 4 -5 in Washington, D.C.

More details.

Encourage your friends, colleagues, and family members to join us for one or more of these important advocacy days. We depend upon our advocates from across the state to come together, show up, step up, and speak out for arts, arts education, and culture. If you have questions, please e-mail info@flca.net.

1. Write down your district numbers to use: Check your voter registration card OR go
here to quickly learn your Florida House, Florida Senate, and U.S. House district
numbers.

2. Check to see if  candidates running in your Florida House and Florida Senate districts completed the State Candidates’ Survey.  Click here to access an Excel file for your county that shows who completed the survey to date and their e-mail addresses. Keep this document open to refer to until both Steps 2 and 3 are complete.

3. Read how they responded to the State Candidates Survey, if they did complete it here.

4. Send those State candidates from your Florida House and Florida Senate districts (if you have candidates running this year) who did not respond to the survey an e-mail (suggested e-mail you can copy, edit, and send) asking each to please complete this easy and quick State candidates’ survey.  Open your e-mail account to compose mail box; copy and paste the candidates’ e-mail addresses from the county Excel file you opened above.

5. Quickly Confirm you sent these e-mails requesting they complete the State Candidates’ Survey.  Click here to confirm.

We share this Advocacy Action message with you on behalf of our friends at the Florida Cultural Alliance

Communicate with gubernatorial candidates NOW — it’s easy and quick.

1. Print this two-page document (print in color if you can).

2. Fill in the name of the candidate of your choice and general information
about you on page 1 of document.

3. Mail the entire signed document to the gubernatorial candidate of your choice –
here are the addresses of all the candidates running for Governor– Excel or PDF

4. Quickly confirm you mailed the platform here.  It will help us keep track of how many
platforms were mailed and from what counties.

We share this Advocacy Action message with you on behalf of our friends at the Florida Cultural Alliance

• County property taxes will shrink for half of property owners, including many homeowners and many buildings that are home to families who rent. Thousands others will see no change from last year.
• All low-income seniors will receive $100 to help pay their property taxes – the program will help 46,000 seniors across Miami-Dade. There is no need to apply, and checks will automatically be sent to all homesteaded homeowners who receive the $25,000 seniors’ tax exemption.
• Miami-Dade County will collect approximately $50 million less in property taxes than they did last year, and $248 million less than the year before that. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of government for a resident of Miami-Dade County is lower than it has been in at least 20 years.
• Three-year contracts with the labor unions, which expire in September 2011, included $225 million in concessions (labor cost savings). Said another way, if it wasn’t for these concessions, we would have had to cut an additional $225 million from the budget. Some of the concessions are temporary, but others – including every County employee contributing 5 percent of base pay to the cost of health insurance, which saves $90 million this year – are permanent.
• Those contracts include a cost-of-living increase in July 2011… but even after it is granted, most County employees’ salary will be 8 to 9 percent below where they would have been without these major concessions. When drastic pay cuts lower payroll in one year – as they did in the 2010 fiscal year – even modest adjustments require payroll increases in the future, even if they don’t offset the prior year’s cuts. If a family cut its expenses in 2010 by 20 percent, and the increased cost of utilities forces them to increase it by 2 percent in 2011, no one would attack them for spending wastefully. To ignore the huge cut in one year and only focus on a small increase the next year… that’s just misleading.
• If the County had adopted a flat tax rate, $150 million more would have been cut from the budget. That would almost certainly have required laying off sworn police officers or firefighters and drastically cutting funding to both social-service and cultural organizations. This would have put our community’s long-term quality of life in jeopardy at the worst possible time. And many homeowners would still have received higher tax bills because of their long-term discounts under Save Our Homes.
• The County is cutting 900 positions, hundreds of which are filled. As a result, the government will have fewer employees than it has in a decade… even though the population is much higher.