Hawkins Releases Statement on Arts and Culture Policies

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Mayor in Syracuse , released today the Green Party policy statement on Arts and Culture for the City of Syracuse . The statement follows:

Arts and Culture Policies for the City of Syracuse

Arts and culture are as vital to the life of a city as its utility system or its transportation system. Arts are not superfluous, but an essential part of our humanity.

Ultimately, we want to live in a society where all the objects of everyday life are artistically crafted and labor itself is an artistic endeavor, as the social critic and artist William Morris envisioned. Morris was one of the principal inspirations of the Arts and Crafts movement that took root in Syracuse in the late 19 th century. The Green Party wants to build upon that legacy. We want the city itself to be a work of art, artistically tailored to its ecological bioregion, from its parks and infrastructure to its architecture and manufactures.

As steps toward that vision, the Green Party and my mayoral campaign advocate the following policies with respect to the arts and culture in Syracuse :

1. Arts in the Public Schools

  Arts education should be woven into the curriculum of the city's public schools from kindergarten through high school. Every child should have the opportunity to find and develop his or her creative and artistic capacities.

The Greens call for a coalition of arts, education, business, philanthropic and government organizations that demonstrate and promote the essential role of the arts in the learning and development of every child and in the improvement of Syracuse 's schools. Forming a strong community alliance of this nature would affirm role of imagination, creativity and the arts in education and city life and the power of the arts to enliven our schools.

One of the reasons some parents move their children to suburban or private schools is the limited opportunities for arts education in the Syracuse city schools. Some estimates place arts funding per student at around one dollar per year.

The Greens also call for bringing artisanship back into vocational training for such trades as printing, horticulture, carpentry, and masonry. It is a sad fact that few of today's building trades people can reproduce the masonry and carpentry that created Syracuse 's best historic buildings. Young people considering these occupations should be trained and encouraged to recover the artisanship and prestige that was once associated with these occupations.

School financing is one of the major limitations on supporting more arts education in the city schools. Shifting the burden of school funding from Syracuse 's limited property tax base to a progressive income and commuter tax will help secure adequate funding for the public schools.

2. Arts in Parks, Recreation, and Youth Programs

A full scale Artist Apprenticeship Program should be at the heart of the city's youth recreation efforts in the parks and schools. Professional practicing artists in Syracuse should be hired part-time to mentor and teach children in youth recreation programs the basics of their respective skills and trades, thus inspiring our children to consider advanced studies and/or a career in an Arts Industry. This program should include fields traditionally considered arts (such as music, film making, fashion, acting, and design) as well as trades in which artisanship is valued such as printing, carpentry, masonry, and horticulture.

3. Arts and Culture Funding

The city has not funded any arts and culture programs since the Young administration in 1992 due to city fiscal constraints. Some arts and culture institutions such as the Everson Museum have never recovered that lost funding.

To the Greens, the Arts are not a “discretionary” budget item; they are an essential for a vibrant and prosperous city. To finance a new Arts Fund, a Green administration would establish two dedicated taxes to support arts and culture programs. One would be a 25-cent tax on each entertainment ticket purchased in the city. The other would be 1 percent tax on investments in new downtown building projects.

All over the world, it has been proven time and again that arts and culture funding is a good investment from an economic development point of view. In addition to restaurants, hotels, and retail businesses benefiting from the influx of people who come into the city to enjoy arts and cultural activities, an enhanced arts and culture scene also attracts a variety of new business development. When businesses make location decisions, managers first find which cities meet their basic business needs (proximity to markets, raw materials, and suppliers, a qualified workforce, and infrastructure such as transportation and energy). Then they decide which of the cities that meet their business requirements they would like to live in based on the quality of life. Along with schools and public safety, arts and culture are a major determinant of a city's quality of life.

4. Department of Cultural Affairs and Syracuse Cultural Plan

Thanks to the work of many dedicated citizens and groups, Syracuse has been working to create an art district downtown. Last year an ordinance was enacted to establish a City of Syracuse Cultural District and a City of Syracuse Cultural District Commission . The Commission is a good start but it is limited in its ability to make a major impact.

According to the stated Powers and Duties of The Cultural District Commission (a volunteer body), it shall only:

1. Make recommendations on sponsorship of programs and activities which could enhance arts and culture and economic development of the Cultural District;

2. Make recommendations on the establishment and/or improvement of a wayfinding system for the Cultural District in conformance with the City's Comprehensive Plan;

3. Conduct research and surveys for the purpose of creating an information database relative to economic development and the arts and cultural activities in the District.

A Green administration will create a Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), fully staffed to make use of the dedicated arts and culture taxes to support programming and to develop and implement a Syracuse Cultural Plan that coordinates arts and culture programs among the school district, the Parks, Recreation, and Youth department, and private arts and cultural institutions in the city.

In addition, the DCA will exercise legal authority to approve and site new public art on property owned by the City of Syracuse and will preserve and protect all monuments, paintings, statues, fountains and memorials that currently exist. Artworks should not be limited to the relative isolation of museums and galleries, but should be woven into the fabric of the city itself. As public art is integrated into the experience of daily life…

… it makes the location more interesting and appealing.

… it creates an opportunity for the general public to get closer to contemporary art.

… it unifies and strengthens the identity of a building or different parts of spatial structures.

… it increases municipal, governmental and corporate investments in art.

… it improves conditions of economical construction by enriching the visual atmosphere.

… it widens the employment opportunities for artists, art organizers and producers.

… it strengthens the ties between artists, architects, formative artists, designers and engineers.

Many cities are beginning to realize that a community's quality of life is intrinsically linked to its cultural strengths and are now trying to figure out how to capitalize. The creation of the Syracuse Cultural Plan will provide a blueprint to boost year-round tourism, keep local talent here, build on the city's cultural venues, and bring more money to the community.

The Syracuse Cultural Plan should:

• Promote year-round Cultural Tourism and link local artists with retailers, hoteliers, and other service providing organizations.
• Promote funding for cultural groups to help them survive and thrive.
• Connect Cultural Groups with Economic Development Agencies by facilitating communication and partnerships between entertainers and artists and festival planners, the economic development agencies, and the local arts councils (Cultural Resources Council and Arts and Culture Leadership Alliance).
• Implement a long-term plan to develop, recruit and retain Syracuse 's artists and cultural workers by ensuring they get what they need to carry out their cultural work here.
• Develop the cultural district as a hub connected to other cultural centers and neighborhoods.
• Encourage cultural activities as a social integrator to bridge people from different neighborhoods, ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic status and support for neighborhood arts programs.
• Build on and promote Syracuse 's historic cultural strengths and centers of excellence.
• Develop a system to monitor, review and evaluate the successes and weaknesses of plans that go forward.
• Actively support year-round programming and develop new programs and events for fall, winter, and spring.
• Help area cultural institutions develop learning programs that directly connect to our city schools and park, recreation, and youth programs.

A major investment to make Syracuse a hub of contemporary arts activity would correspond to how the geography and hierarchy of the art world has changed in recent years. The “art world” used to be concentrated in such cities as New York and Paris . The trend in today's information age is both globalization and decentralization, enabling artists to work in many new, more affordable locales while remaining connected to global arts communities. The energy, production, and inspiration within the artistic community of Syracuse give us a strong foundation upon which we should build.

5. The City Itself as a Work of Art

The city itself – its citywide urban design, its neighborhood community designs, its infrastructure, buildings, and enterprises – should become a collective work of art that the people participate in creating.

To enable this to happen, we have called for a neighborhood-directed development using green technologies and widespread community ownership to create a Sustainable Syracuse that is tailored to the ecology of this bioregion.

Neighborhood-directed development starts with Neighborhood Assemblies in each of the 25 or so real city neighborhoods. Every neighborhood resident would have a voice and a vote in determining neighborhood plans and programs and in electing representatives to citywide councils and boards.

The Neighborhood Assemblies would annually review the city's Comprehensive Plan and instruct their neighborhood representatives to the city on their recommended changes in and priorities for the Comprehensive Plan. The assemblies would also annually review and amend their own neighborhoods' Community Plans.

To provide technical support for this grassroots planning process, the city would create a Planning Department with architects, engineers, and graphic artists to provide technical expertise and visual displays to help neighborhoods with community design and the city as a whole with its urban design.

To foster widespread community ownership, the city would establish a Municipal Bank with a business development arm that can help plan, finance, and advise new community-owned enterprises that put our own people into business as worker-owners.

We need these neighborhood-directed planning and development capacities if we are going to craft the kind of city we want to live in. Under the current arrangements, private developers and absentee-owned corporations are calling the shots. With the Destiny USA project, government is creating a highly subsidized competitor to all retail and entertainment businesses in the rest of Syracuse . This private developer is now the effective city planner. With a Planning Department and Municipal Bank giving us the capacity to determine our own plans, developers and corporations wanting to do business here will then have to fit into our plans, instead of us continuing to adapt to their plans, which have resulted in an eroded tax base, under-funded public services, low-wage jobs, and monotonous sprawl that is ecologically, and thus economically, unsustainable.

With a participatory planning process supported by technical assistance from the Planning Department and the Municipal Bank, many things would be possible, including:

Mixed-Use Arts Facilities Downtown: The city should encourage the development of mixed-use arts facilities in the Downtown Cultural District where artists can both live and work. Such buildings would have retail on the ground floor, including exhibition space and artists' studios where visitors can observe artists at work. Upstairs floors would have loft-style live/work spaces and common workspaces with shared technical facilities. The costs of both renting an apartment and a studio for work make making ends meet more difficult than it needs to be for artists. As proven in other cities, mixed-use arts facilities will attract artists to live and work downtown.

Public Arts Facilities should be created to serve the Syracuse community by providing innovative arts programming, rewarding educational curricula, workshops, seminars, guest lecturers, exemplary arts showcasing, varied individual and family entertainment, international exhibitions, artist residencies, multimedia technologies, and broadband connectivity. This in turn would create substantial opportunities for translating visual and performing arts content into new formats for marketing and distribution locally, nationally, and internationally. Building such facilities will solidify the city of Syracuse as a stronghold in the realm of global arts initiatives and the long-term effect of creating such a “lifestyle center” will contribute to the cultural and economic revitalization of the downtown area, and consequently, the Central New York Region at large.

Quality Handcrafts: One of the legacies of the Arts and Crafts movement that remains in Syracuse is a cluster of businesses producing quality handcrafts in the ceramics and furniture industries. The city's economic development strategy should support and build upon this industry cluster.

Artisanship in the Trades: City economic development strategy with respect to workforce development should also encourage recovering artisanship in trades such as carpentry, masonry, sheet metal work, plumbing, ironwork, and horticulture and their application to building upon Syracuse's historic architectural legacy while applying green building technologies for renewable energy, nontoxic building, and urban agriculture.

Renewable Energy: The city should establish city-owned utility to produce local, clean, affordable, reliable energy from a mosaic of renewable sources, including solar, wind, low-head hydro, and biofuels. The city's built environment should be retrofitted for efficiency, conservation, and solar energy production on rooftops.

Biological Waste Treatment: Instead of chemically treating sewage and dumping the partially treated effluent into Onondaga Lake , the city should move toward biological treatment systems that can produce natural gas from sewage in anaerobic biodigesters, harvestable crops that are nourished on sewage wastes in “living machines,” and clean water to return to Onondaga Lake .

Restoration of the Onondaga Creek and Erie Canal Waterways: The city should restore Onondaga Creek and re-dig the Erie Canal to create broad linear park-like mixed-use corridors with green industries, urban agriculture, ecological housing, high-density retail/apartment clusters, schools, parks, and museums, all linked by Greenways with bike and pedestrian paths and light rail trains.

Green Manufacturing : The Erie Canal corridor should become a linear eco-industrial park providing a manufacturing base for ecological and economic sustainability in Syracuse . Green factories could be linked into "cradle-to-cradle" manufacturing and remanufacturing networks where the waste of one industry is the raw material for another.

Urban Agriculture: The Onondaga Creek corridor should become a “garden city” with urban agricultural enterprises providing a significant source of organic produce for the city and with a restored Onondaga Creek serving as a catalyst for economic, social, and environmental improvement, particularly in the economically depressed Near West and South Sides.

Greenways: A convenient network of park-like streets and corridors for bike and pedestrian paths and lights rails should provide easy mobility linking homes to schools, parks, shopping districts, and jobs around the city.