San Diego Restored Arts Funding—But the Crisis Isn’t Over

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.

Every spring, Christine Martinez reaches out to the arts community to explain what’s on the line, hoping they’ll engage with the city’s budget process. Cultural funding, she constantly reminds, is almost always strapped to the guillotine. Especially in a city strapped for cash.

“It’s not an easy ask,” says Martinez, manager of Arts+Culture:San Diego. “Showing up is a real cost for small, volunteer-run groups that can’t spare half a day at City Council without possibly having to close their doors.”

Then, last April—with one day’s notice to arts leaders—Mayor Todd Gloria proposed a budget that didn’t trim arts funding; it eviscerated it, from $13.8 million to $2 million. An 85 percent slash. Other city departments faced cuts of about 7 percent.

The scheduled date of the cuts was just three months away (beginning of the fiscal year). Organizational leaders have to plan months if not years ahead to run their organizations. They had made hires, dedicated spending, and programmed their seasons based on a reasonable expectation that support for the arts would be somewhat in line with previous years. (The City has allotted at least $7 million a year to arts every year for the last 20 years, and the last four years have ranged between $13.8 and $18.2 million.)

The day felt even more existential given the national and international climate around the arts: namely, the federal government’s repeated proposal to eliminate the country’s two biggest cultural foundations (NEA and NEH), and the global trend of AI replacing more costly human creatives.

“It shocked everybody,” says Kamaal Martin, arts commissioner and co-founder of Art Power Equity. “If the message had been, ‘Times are tough, everybody tighten their belts a little,’ it would have landed differently. But there was no vision offered for the future, no parity in the cut. It was just, essentially, ‘Fuck you.’”

Among things I’m good at—sleeping late, low bidding for expensive shoes on Poshmark, parallel parking on either side of the street—budget analysis isn’t among them. In trying to understand how bad the finances were for San Diego to propose this drastic cut, I found myself drowning in numbers, pie charts, and politi-speak.

In his April 27 newsletter, Gloria explained that balancing the budget means “asking hard questions about every single dollar this city spends: Is this a core responsibility of city government, or is it something we do when we can afford to?”

Fair enough—if he were to ask those hard questions about every single dollar this city spends. It also makes his conclusion clear: The City of San Diego does not view supporting arts and culture as a core responsibility.

Which begs more than a few questions: Should the City be responsible? If not, then who? How crucial are arts and culture to a city? And since this is a budget discussion, how much revenue does the arts and culture industry generate for San Diego? What’s the ROI?

The Impact of Arts & Culture

$1.2 billion.

That’s how much economic activity San Diego’s arts and culture nonprofits generated in 2022, according to the City’s latest Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 report. The industry created nearly 17,000 jobs and generated $878 million of personal income for local residents. About 15 percent of the people showing up to arts events in San Diego are tourists, so money was raised through TOT (Transit Occupancy Tax). The activity generated $275.7 million in tax revenue to the city.

In other words, the ROI seems to be ROI-ing.

Still, there have been signs that cuts were coming. In 2025, the City demoted the Department of Cultural Affairs to a division, folding it into the Economic Development Department (EDD). That meant Cultural Affairs no longer had independence, nor its own leader sitting at the same organizational level as departments like parks and recreation, library, police, and fire. It lost institutional leverage and would now have to compete with other EDD priorities—real estate, airport operations, business development, etc.—for budget allocation.

To be clear, few arts administrators and leaders I spoke with are interested in the either/or false choice of funding law enforcement or after-school programs; the fire departments or libraries. They’re sincere in looking for solutions that don’t leave any single group with a greater burden of righting a long-out-of-balance budget.

Jennifer de Poyen, executive director of Space 4 Art, says Gloria had long been a supporter of the arts, which made his attempted Red Wedding especially upsetting.

“This is our guy,” she says. “I went in to talk to him when he was running [for mayor], and he could tell you my mission and why [Space 4 Art] exists, and the rationale, and the story—everything. He knew it all. That’s the kind of guy he is, and he believed in it. And so it’s really baffling.”

To understand how a departme—er, division—could get zilched with almost no warning, we gotta rewind.

San Diego’s had a structural budget deficit for years, driven by a mix of rising pension costs, aging infrastructure, and revenue that hasn’t kept pace with the cost of running the city. The city faced a $170 million deficit in 2025, with the Department of Finance projecting deficits will total $1.03 billion between 2026 and 2030.

Clearly, revenue needs to be increased, or costs need to be cut.

Last year, the City trimmed arts and culture funding from $16.1 million to $13.8 million, a 14 percent reduction (libraries and parks were also cut). In September 2025, the City announced it was going to implement paid parking at Balboa Park—the main stage for San Diego’s most established cultural institutions. They estimated it would bring $11 million a year to help close the budget gap. On January 5, 2026, for the first time in its 150-plus-year history, paid parking officially went into effect.

Martin says it was another huge policy change without warning: “We got a courtesy presentation after it was basically already done. No economic impact studies. No depth of analysis. No forecast of what attendance would look like.”

Immediately, attendance at the park’s institutions dropped by as much as 50 percent—a devastating hit to nonprofits that depend on foot traffic, membership, staffers, and volunteers.

Attendance at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum dropped about 40 percent. “We needed to cut an hour of our operating time and one day a week,” executive director Michael Warburton told Fox 5 San Diego in May. By the time the funding cut hit months later, the museum had already laid off three full-time and two part-time staff.

Public backlash was equally swift, especially in various comments sections, which created a bona fide PR fiasco. Parking meter vigilantes—who superglued the machines, rendering them unusable—became black-hat folk heroes. There’s something Schadenfreude-y about people rejecting, by any means necessary, the gated-communityification of a city’s central park.

A group led by former Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey moved to put a repeal on the ballot. Then a separate lawsuit over trash fees forced the City’s hand. As part of the settlement, the City agreed to scrap paid parking in Balboa Park. The parking meters will be rehomed January 1, 2027.

But the collective anger didn’t dissipate. It only festered a growing suspicion that arts and culture was being downgraded as a priority for the city.

“Before [the budget proposal] happened, I had a meeting with the top person in economic development,” says Martin. “And I asked her directly: Is Todd coming for TOT funding? She told me, ‘He’s coming for your money.’ She didn’t want it to happen, because her money was tied to it, too.”

Some silver linings: For months after the budget cuts were proposed, San Diego’s arts and culture community was not only the biggest headline across the county, but it also made national and international news.

A good portion of credit goes to Martinez from Arts+Culture:San Diego and her colleague Bob Lehman, executive director of San Diego Art Matters. When the budget proposal broke, they immediately turned to their contact lists, began outreach, and helped organize rallies.

Hundreds of people—artists, culture keepers, administrators, laypeople—showed up. They called in at City Council meetings, wrote op-eds across all media, spoke at press conferences, and sent strongly worded emails to council members. Some fought back peacefully, some tearfully, others with outrage. People who’d never once shown up to a council meeting waited hours to give a minute of testimony.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.

Not surprisingly, the protests were creative, poignant, theatrical—a show. There was live music.

“When we heard the budget was going to essentially get zeroed out—the grant money zeroed out, 100 percent—the people who’d been on the fence in other years said, ‘I have to be there,’” says Martinez.

By June, there was a deal. The City redirected $6 million in hotel tax revenue originally earmarked for Convention Center debt. Council members tasked the independent budget analyst with going back through the numbers and finding more. They did: $1.385 million to restore arts grants.

And then—as has been the historical case with funding arts and culture in San Diego, like how a grant from Joan and Irwin Jacobs saved the San Diego Symphony—a nonprofit giant dedicated to city culture partially saved the day. The Prebys Foundation gave a one-time donation of $3 million.

All told, the total 2027 budget dedicated to arts and culture for 2027 is $10.35 million.

“San Diego is known nationally for having a very robust arts advocacy engine,” says Jonathon Glus, Senior Fellow for Art & Design at the Prebys Foundation, pointing out it’s among a handful of cities organized enough that when this budget battle broke out, the whole country noticed. “[The city] has usually been seen as a model for public funding for the arts. This year, that model was challenged.”

While some have described it as a win, the reality is the arts and culture division will receive $3.45 million less than it did last year. It’s a 25 percent cut, three and a half times as much as other departments. Some, like Martin, fear a drip-drip-drip, death-by-a-thousand-papercuts method is the tactic.

“It already felt like political theater,” he says. “As if they knew the arts and culture community had a sophisticated enough advocacy operation that we’d pitch a fit, get some of the funding restored, and they’d do the same thing again next year—a little less each time.”

Executive director of the Balboa Art Conservation Center Leticia Gomez Franco crunched the numbers: “I used 50 percent of my nerdness and 100 percent of my pettiness to make a whole-ass chart of OSP [Organizational Support Program] allocations since the year I was born to prove that we in fact did not save the arts. Instead, we suffered the biggest irreparable loss of city funding in history.”

The ripple effects are already visible. Three youth arts organizations housed in Balboa Park’s Casa del Prado—San Diego Junior Theatre, San Diego Civic Youth Ballet, and San Diego Youth Symphony—serve more than 6,000 students annually, and now face program reductions. The city’s Community Projects, Programs and Services grant program—which funded smaller efforts like the Rolando Street Fair, Pacific Beachfest, Juneteenth festivals, and a Día de Muertos celebration in Sherman Heights—was eliminated.

Many nonprofit organizations receiving grants from the City were in the process of planning their budgets when the proposed cut was announced. Even with a partial restoration, some institutions will be getting as much as 40 percent less than they’d anticipated.

“There’s a mandatory minimum—a floor—but no ceiling,” Martin explains. “If [an organization] was only going to get $10,000, you’ll probably still get close to that; if you were getting $300,000, you might only get $220,000. Only organizations apply, not individuals. And everyone already knew roughly what they were going to get before the cut—and now it’s a surprise how much less.”

Imagine that happening to your family budget. Oh, wait. As someone living in 2026, you likely don’t have to imagine such economic stress.

The existential questions for San Diego’s arts and culture remain. Whose responsibility is it to fund our cultural identity? Is it normal for city governments to shoulder part of that cost?

Should some of the responsibility fall on local businesses? How much is on us as individuals—through season passes, etc? If the industry raises hundreds of millions in tax revenue for the city, doesn’t it make sense for it to invest a percentage of that revenue back into the system? Especially to support the next-generation of culture makers who need the support to get off the ground?

Beyond the beaches, sunsets, and parks—what, or who, makes San Diego…San Diego?

Throughout this issue, you’ll see profiles of 31 people who are pushing the city’s arts and culture forward in various ways, many of them behind the scenes doing the necessary work.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.

The post San Diego Restored Arts Funding—But the Crisis Isn’t Over appeared first on San Diego Magazine.