Would you pay more taxes if it meant funding your local museum? Detroit residents will. Yesterday, a controversial millage for the Detroit Institute of the Arts narrowly passed in three counties by just 1,340 votes, with a total of 125,000 cast. The 0.2-mill property tax will cost residents $15 annually for every $150,000 in fair-market home value. The tax means DIA will receive a total of $23 million in annual public funding for the next 10 years.
“We’re getting 10 years of security,” museum director Graham Beal told the Wall Street Journal. “With those funds coming in, we can be a normal museum.”
DIA’s campaign for the tax, and the flood of press coverage that surrounded it, provided a candid look at the value the Detroit community places on having a marquee museum. The tax will affect the three voting counties that make up 80 percent of DIA’s visitors. DIA promised that if the measure passed, it would offer residents of the those counties free admission and amp up its public programs. Without the measure, museum leadership said, the institution would have to lay off as many as 70 employees, curtail temporary exhibitions, shutter four days out of the week, and eliminate most of its education programs.
Though the stakes were high, the campaign yielded some heartwarming anecdotes. Last Wednesday, a pair of local brothers — Harrison Hunger, 5, and Dash, 3 — set up a lemonade stand outside their home to raise money for the Detroit Institute for the Arts. They brought in $22.50 in 45 minutes.
“Even though I don’t get there often, I think of the museum as a jewel, as a gem of our region, and I would be embarrassed if we had to close it,” Plymouth resident Nancy Parent, who voted for the millage, told the Detroit Free Press.
The opposition ranged from those with a blanket distaste for increased taxes in today’s climate to those who maintain the arts are an extravagance that should not be funded through taxes. (“It's a luxury for the area," Robert Gosselin, an Oakland County commissioner who voted against putting the measure on Tuesday's ballot, told the Journal.) Others suggested DIA was overstating the seriousness of its financial situation and criticized its director’s over $400,000 salary.
The museum’s victory follows years of shrinking public funds familiar to many museums in struggling cities across the country. DIA received $16 million from the state of Michigan in 1990; this year it got nothing. Beal said that the 10-year tax will give him time to build the museum’s endowment; by 2024, DIA hopes to have a nest egg of $400 million. The interest from the endowment would generate 60 percent of the annual budget.
The method isn’t particularly innovative. The millage isn’t the first of its kind in Detroit and similar measures have been passed to buoy museums in Denver and Saint Louis. What makes this one notable is the economic climate in which it was passed. Those similar measures in Denver and St. Louis were voted through in the 1980s and 1960s, respectively. Detroit’s earlier millage, which raised money for the zoo, was approved in March 2008, before the market crash.
More remarkable still, Detroit residents voted down a millage proposal for cultural institutions including DIA in 2000 and 2002. (The tax was much higher then — $1,000 per household — but then, so was the Dow Jones.) Museum employees all over the country should celebrate. The public — at least a narrow majority of the public in Detroit — sees their work as something worth paying for, even when there is plenty it can’t afford.