How Investing in Drainage Can Fund Music and Culture
Culture can be a nail and anything can be a hammer. Here's an example.
Following a devastating flood in 2016, the city and parish of Lafayette, Louisiana could no longer ignore its significant drainage problem. Much like the rest of coastal Louisiana, its broken relationship with water and building on recessed areas that previously served as natural drainage paired with over 24 inches in 24 hours, led to nowhere for the water to go but into homes and buildings. The community demanded infrastructure improvements to mitigate flood risks going forward. But raising taxes was not politically feasible. So Mayor-President at the time, Joel Robideaux and his team - including his cultural advisor, Kate Durio (who is the former Chief of Projects at Sound Diplomacy - interest declared) - came up with an idea. The Mayor-President was thinking bigger than drainage. Could Lafayette fund these necessary infrastructure costs while also investing in generating new wealth for these and other needs through Lafayette’s greatest natural resource, its culture? The answer was to combine the drainage and creative economy ask into one, and put it to their voters to reallocate an existing surplus to address both, at the same time.
In an election in November 2017, the city council and voters did just that. A small percentage, 4.4-mill, of surplus property taxes allocated to public health would be redirected to drainage. This resulted in $10 million annually, with an even smaller percentage of .25-mill going to set up a program to invest in the creative economy, resulting in $500,000 annually. The measure passed and the result was that not only did residents get improved drainage, they were also able to fund arts and culture. From 2017 through 2021, this funding was directed into a program called CREATE - culture, recreation, entertainment, arts and tourism. The city and parish of Lafayette created, and funded, a cultural office.
I am not writing about this to solely reference best practices and state that every community should explore doing this. CREATE was defunded by the next administration. The current Mayor-President, Josh Guillory, redirected the funds in 2021. But the tactic - incorporating a request to support the creative economy alongside other infrastructural needs - is what is illuminating. CREATE was built into a wider city strategy, rather than being bolted onto an existing plan.
It is this way of thinking that should guide how we invest in our music and cultural economy. More often than not, I see those advocating for music - myself included - seeing music as an investment in and of itself. Music, or more culture, is the solution, no matter what the problem is. Instead, if we looked at investing in music and culture as a potential solution to something outside of music, there’d be far more success in embedding it in as part of a city’s capital fund, especially in places that lean conservative or lack a robust history of state-supported arts and culture.
But this also demonstrates how quickly progress can be reversed. Mayor-President Guillory had different priorities and for whatever reason, music and culture were not one of them. While politics is at play here (do the polar opposite thing your opponent did), if there was irrefutable economic evidence that CREATE was improving the lives of residents, generating taxes and creating jobs, it may have been more difficult to eliminate it. There wasn’t enough time to do that in this case, but it poses another challenge - where are the irrefutable use cases?
AGENT OF CHANGE #3
Every week I will feature someone positively impacting their community through music and culture. I call them the Agents of Change.
The third Agent of Change is…. @Gayle Dillman
Who? Gayle is the founder of Gable Music Ventures, a regional promoter who stages the Ladybug Festival, an all-female music festival that is held in both Wilmington and Milford, Delaware.
What Is She Doing? Gayle has been at the forefront of showcasing diverse, local artists in Delaware for over a decade. Ladybird was ahead of its time - being unabashedly diverse and female-focused, which has led to her being recognised as one of the leading creative entrepreneurs in the state.
Why Should We Care? It is our local promoters that take the first risk in artists - providing the spaces, places and conditions to play. Gable Music Ventures is one of those firms every city or state should have - intentional in its support of local artists, but global in its outlook. Gayle should be applauded for the work she does.
If you want to learn more….here is her LinkedIn.
And thank you to Kate Durio for fact-checking this Substack.