At its Sept. 4 meeting, Nelson City Council approved the Nelson and District Arts Council’s request for $25,000 for the 2019 mural festival unanimously with no debate and very little discussion.
“The nice thing about the mural festival is that it continues year round,” said councillor Michael Dailly. “People come to visit, and you can do your own mural tour any time.”
The money will come from the city’s downtown and waterfront reserve fund.
For the 2018 festival the city contributed $25,000 to the total budget of $90,000 which included payment to all the artists.
Organizer Sydney Black says next year’s budget will be $120,000, an increase that will allow for more live music and enhanced workshops. She said she will attempt to get funding from the Canadian Heritage Fund and the Columbia Basin Trust as well as the local business sponsors who helped out this year.
Black calls this year’s festival a big success, and one the reasons for this is that the murals are still there after the festival.
“It will benefit the community for a long time. It’s not just a temporary flash in the pan like the theatre stuff I usually do.”
Related: Nelson’s mural festival: scenes from opening night
She said the festival events were not as well attended as hoped because of forest fire smoke.
“But somehow we still had people out to workshops and artist talks and almost 500 people out on opening night.”
Black said the visiting artists, including one from Australia and a couple from Miami, “loved the hometown feel. They are used to painting in big cities like Sydney and London and Miami. We took them out and showed them around, the building owners took them on tours, restaurants gave them gift certificates.”
The downtown and waterfront reserve fund receives $80,000 per year from parking meter revenue — the saving that was created when the provincial government moved back to GST from HST.
“When we were paying HST we had to submit 13 cents on each dollar we collected in parking meter revenue to the federal government,” city finance manager Colin McClure told the Star. “When it changed back to GST we are now remitting five cents per dollar of parking meter revenue. That resulted in a significant savings to the city and [the previous] council decided to use that savings to create a reserve to fund projects in the downtown and waterfront area. Currently, we are budgeted to transfer $80,000 each year into this reserve.”
