There’s good and bad news for operators of the Arden Theatre.
The good news is the facility can now access funding from a provincial grant that was thought to be off-limits. The bad news is the pot of provincial money has shrunk by an undisclosed amount.
“I’m happy that we’ll be eligible for funding for last season because that placed us in a very difficult position,” said Gail Barrington-Moss, St. Albert’s director of cultural services.
In the last week it surfaced that municipalities will no longer be eligible for the Community Presenting Project Grant, which pays back a portion of the fees that theatres pay to Canadian-based professional touring artists. This left Barrington-Moss scrambling to find a way to recoup $85,000 she’d expected from the province.
Clarification from the province’s Culture and Community Spirit department confirmed that the theatre can access the retroactive grant for the performance series that just ended. However, the pool of money is less, meaning the entire $85,000 the city was looking for won’t be available, Barrington-Moss said.
The news that program will not be available to municipalities in the future remains accurate, said Culture and Community Spirit Minister Lindsay Blackett.
This means that St. Albert must decide whether to make up the funds through money received from the Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) or align with a not-for-profit to access the funds, he said.
Blackett said the intent behind changing the eligibility criteria is to prevent municipalities from “double-dipping” or accessing numerous government programs. He said it was clear when the government began providing operating funds through the MSI that it was to cover all municipal operations.
“[Municipalities] said ‘hey, we’ll take the money, we’ll take the money. Now all of a sudden it’s one thing that they don’t get funded for and it becomes a bit of an issue,” he said.
Barrington-Moss isn’t keen to attempt a partnership with an existing non-profit because these groups are already stretched to capacity.
“As far as creating not for profits just for this grant, it doesn’t make sense but if that’s the only way we can get funding then that’s what we’ll have to do,” she said. “We would certainly look at exploring that.”
Mayor Nolan Crouse said the operating money the city receives through MSI is earmarked for the library and he’s not interested in trying to spread it to other areas.
“You’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he said.
“Either we’re going to have to cut some programming or raise ticket prices or find some society approach to get the funding,” he said.
“Our staff is going to have to help us solve this.”
