Red River music venues push Council on funding expected from February resolution

Leaders of the Red River Cultural District are pushing City Council members and staff to carry out a February resolution that was intended to secure annual funding to help planning and marketing efforts for the downtown cluster of live music venues.

Earlier this week, the RRCD put out a call to its stakeholders and the larger music community raising the issue that the May 2 deadline included in the resolution has passed with no funding source identified from the city budget. The district, one of three formally recognized by the city, is seeking between $120,000 and $300,000 per year to fund marketing, economic analysis and other operational expenses.

Nicole Klepadlo, interim executive director of RRCD, said conversations with staff in recent months have been unproductive in terms of finding the dollars called for by Council.

“We’re told that there is no funding. We have spoken with Council office aides, and I’ll say some of those conversations felt more fruitful in a time when the city is looking at budget realities,” she said, noting that recent talks on using revenue from street closure fees or parking fees have shown those could be more realistic funding sources than drawing from the General Fund budget.

“It’s frustrating that we have not heard anything,” she said. “A lot of hours and effort have gone into securing these funds and educating people on all the good work that we do, and so we thought it was appropriate to bring it back up.”

The RRCD was established in 2013 to help unify the music venues and other hospitality businesses in the area that are seeing increasing development pressures on all sides from projects such as the Waterloo Greenway, the health care innovation initiative at the University of Texas and the reconstruction of Interstate 35. In addition to organizing two annual festivals – January’s Free Week and July’s Hot Summer Nights – the organization has helped to secure city funding for infrastructure improvements and is involved in helping to shape the city’s incentives and other planning tools related to any future redevelopment within the area.

Council Member Ryan Alter has worked with Council Member Zo Qadri in recent months to help identify a funding source despite some claims there is no way to find the roughly $150,000 needed for the district.

“Some staff has been a little better at helping us find this money than others. Staff is busy, but we wanted this to be a priority and so either way, I think we will get there,” he said, adding there should be movement on the funding question soon. “We’ll have to look outside of the traditional Cultural Arts pool of money because clearly that money is fully subscribed multiple times over. So what we need to do is look to other areas where we might be able to find this amount of money, and $150,000 in the scheme of our city budget should be findable if we get a little creative.”

With the Economic Development Department currently working on creating a framework that would create a standardized process for establishing cultural districts in other areas of Austin, Alter said the city needs to set guidelines for how those organizations will be funded, whether via the city budget or other means.

“It is incumbent upon us that if we’re going to set up any of these districts which are so valuable, we have to identify at the front end how we’re going to contribute to them or set clear expectations that we’re not and that there needs to be a way for them to sustain themselves one way or another,” he said. “We can’t find ourselves in this position again.”

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Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted In: Budget, Music & Entertainment, District 9