If San Diego Wants a Cultural Future, Here’s the Work

San Diego is facing an 85 percent cut to arts and culture funding. This is not just a reduction or a course correction. This is a cliff. And the question now isn’t whether people care—the response to last week’s piece made that abundantly clear—it’s whether caring is enough to change what happens next.

It isn’t. Not on its own.

This problem didn’t appear overnight, and accountability doesn’t belong in one place. Local leaders are making difficult choices inside a fiscal squeeze that extends far beyond City Hall. That’s real. But it doesn’t make an 85 percent cut responsible and it doesn’t absolve any of us, in the public or private sector, from the work ahead.

So here is that work, as specifically as I can name it.

Reduce the Cut

The proposed drop from roughly $13.8 million to $2 million has been widely reported as an 85 percent reduction solely to the arts budget. That number is accurate, and its implications are severe.

There is a meaningful difference between asking every sector to share in fiscal pain and effectively collapsing one. Arts and culture funding isn’t abstract: it creates jobs, drives foot traffic to neighborhoods, generates tax revenue, and supports organizations that took decades to build. An overnight cut of this magnitude with a July 1, 2026, effective date gives those organizations little to no time to adapt. Some won’t survive the attempt.

A more responsible approach would phase the reduction over time, preserve core grantmaking where possible, and give organizations enough runway to respond. That’s not special treatment. That’s how you manage a transition without causing irreversible damage.

Other cities have also developed smarter ways to finance the arts structurally. Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, funded by a voter-approved regional sales tax of one penny on every $10, distributed nearly $85 million to almost 300 organizations in 2024. A 2025 study found those organizations generated $3.1 billion in economic activity and supported nearly 14,500 jobs. Houston ties cultural support directly to tourism by dedicating portions of hotel tax revenue to arts and culture. It’s an important thing to keep alive: In 2022, nonprofit arts organizations generated about $1.3 billion in economic activity in Houston alone.

The lesson isn’t that San Diego should replicate any one model. It’s that the healthiest arts ecosystems are built on stable, predictable funding—not annual uncertainty. San Diego has the same ingredients. What it lacks, right now, is the political will to use them.

We Need to Act Like Stakeholders

If we want a vibrant arts and culture scene, we need to acknowledge that the government alone should not be responsible for footing the bill. People who care about this ecosystem need to participate in it in specific, tangible ways.

That means making concrete choices with how we spend our time and money. It means buying museum memberships, theater subscriptions, class packages, and event tickets at institutions like the San Diego Museum of Art, Fleet Science Center, the Vanguard at Westminster Theater, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Japanese Friendship Garden, and at organizations like Cygnet Theatre, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego Opera, North Coast Rep, and Broadway San Diego. It means showing up to a class at the San Diego Craft Collective, a Voices of Our City Choir performance, or Mission Fed ArtWalk. These aren’t symbolic gestures. They’re direct financial decisions that keep institutions alive when public funding retreats.

I want to address something that came up repeatedly in the responses to last week’s article. Several invoked “Penny for the Arts” as though voters had already weighed in either for or against arts funding. That’s not quite right. Penny for the Arts was a San Diego City Council policy adopted in 2012, not a ballot measure. It committed to restoring arts funding to 9.52 percent of annual hotel tax revenue by 2017. The city never fully met that goal. In FY24, the actual arts allocation was about $18.3 million—well below the roughly $31 million that full funding would have implied.

In November 2024, voters did reject Measure E, a proposed 1 cent sales tax increase. Its failure worsened the city’s overall budget pressure, but it’s important to note that Measure E had no dedicated carveout for arts and culture. Voting no on Measure E was not a vote against the arts. It was a vote against a general fund increase.

I raise this because the conversation matters, and it should be based on facts. If San Diego is going to ask arts organizations to survive on less public support, we need to understand the situation clearly.

Businesses Must Invest in the Arts, Too

Local brands and businesses have to do more than applaud the arts community; they have to invest in it. That doesn’t always mean making a nonprofit donation, though that matters too.

It means hiring local creatives (writers, photographers, designers, musicians) for real, well-paying commercial work. It means choosing a local creative agency for a campaign instead of outsourcing to another city. It means commissioning original work, sponsoring cultural programming and events, and treating creative labor as the economic driver it actually is.

My husband Troy and I sit on the board of San Diego FC’s Playmakers initiative—the club’s artists and creatives program, which has built artist collaborations tied to merchandise and community activations. It won’t fund a museum or a library. But it is a clear example of what it looks like when a major brand invests in the creative community as part of its identity and growth strategy.

Another way to approach this systemically: What if the top 10 corporations in San Diego each pledged to dedicate one percent of their marketing budget to hiring local artists, sponsoring local events, or commissioning local studios? In isolation, one percent doesn’t sound like much. In aggregate, across 10 major companies, it would represent a genuine catalyst for the creative economy—and it would send a signal that San Diego’s business community understands what’s at stake.

In a moment when public support is contracting, private sector participation is a critical part of the solution.

Media Is Part of The Infrastructure

I own a for-profit arts and culture media company, so I want to be transparent: I have a direct stake in this ecosystem. I also think that stake gives me a clear view of something that doesn’t get discussed enough.

Cultural media coverage and cultural institutions have a symbiotic relationship.

At the very minimum, people need to know what’s happening in order to engage. That’s where listings and calendars come in: the KPBS Arts Calendar, the San Diego Theatre Alliance calendar, Arts+Culture:SD, the City of San Diego’s own listings, and San Diego Magazine’s Things to Do column and Best of San Diego newsletter all play that role. 

But deeper, well-produced stories do something different. They have the power to create a real movement and galvanize people to care on an emotional level. A reported feature on an artist that conveys a compelling human behind it that people want to know more about. An essay that explains why a body of work matters or gives historical context on a movement—that kind of journalism leaves a lasting impression, a deeper impulse to get near it, participate in it. It builds a bridge between artist and audience, between institution and attendee. It turns curiosity into connection, and connection into a ticket purchase, then a return visit or membership.

Even at San Diego Magazine, we can’t keep pace with the volume of work happening in this city. Every week, we receive hundreds of pitches about new galleries, performances, installations, and cultural projects. The scene is bigger and more active than we are staffed to cover, not because the work isn’t there but because the resources aren’t.

That’s why local media should be understood as cultural infrastructure, not a separate category. When editorial capacity shrinks, visibility for the city’s arts and culture shrinks. When visibility shrinks, attendance follows. And when attendance falls, the sponsorships, donations, and earned revenue that institutions depend on get harder to sustain. Supporting local media by subscribing, advertising, or partnering is one concrete way to keep that cycle moving in the right direction.

The public response to Mayor Todd Gloria’s proposed budget cuts revealed something worth holding onto: The arts and culture are not a side issue for San Diegans. They are woven into this city’s economic life, its civic identity, and the texture of daily experience in ways that are easy to take for granted until they’re gone.

I’ve spent the past 18 years working in media, and five of those years building a business around this city’s creative community. I’ve watched what happens when arts and culture budgets get cut—including tough decisions we’ve needed to make over the years at the magazine. Coverage disappears, venues close, artists leave because the conditions that made staying possible no longer exist. The losses compound quietly, and they are very hard to reverse.

The answer here isn’t to pretend government should fund everything forever. It also isn’t to pretend the private market can absorb an 85 percent cut overnight without real and lasting damage. The answer is a stronger, more intentional mix: public investment and private support, civic engagement and earned revenue, media infrastructure and community participation—and all of it understood as part of the same ecosystem.

San Diego cares about its culture. The public response to the budget proposal proved that. The question now is: What, specifically, are we each willing to do to support it, and how soon will we act?

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