Montclair Arts Council Faces Budget Cut Threat

The Montclair Arts Council just announced that the first annual Montclair Music and Arts Festival that had been scheduled for July 24th has been cancelled.

Pat Brechka, Director Recreation and Cultural Affairs, said the event was cancelled because the person charged with organizing the event "was laid off along with other staff personnel."

Is this a sign of things to come?

With the threat of a $20,000 budget cut hanging over its head, the Montclair Arts Council has warned of the possibility of another important casualty: DestinationMontclair.com, the cultural tourism Web site launched just over a year ago.

The result of a 2008 grant from the N.J. Department of Tourism, DestinationMontclair.com provides residents, as well as many visitors, with "one-stop shopping" when planning an outing in Montclair.

MAC is just one of a number of local entities - another is the Montclair Public Library - that is fighting back against a proposed cut of $69.9 million in municipal funding in the 2010 budget. The cuts are not a done deal and at least some members of the Town Council say they want to work hard to restore at least some money to MAC and other organizations.

For MAC, the $20,000 reduction would mark a huge chunk of the $72,000 in municipal funding it had expected to receive this year.

"I don't know how we would keep the site up," said Jim Peskin, MAC's executive director.

MAC already has received $36,000 this year and is scheduled to receive two more payments of $18,000 each.

"If they decided to cut our budget by $20,000 … that means we would lose the entire 4th quarter, which we really can't withstand," Peskin said. "It's not just the Web site that will close, but the entire organization will be forced to close. The funds from the Township pay for our basic staff. If we can't provide a professionally run organization, then we can't operate."

Peskin holds up DestinationMontclair.com as one asset the town can't afford to do without.

"About 60 percent of arts patrons come from outside Montclair," he said. "These people look at the Web site to find out what's going on."

A previously established Web site, GoToMontclair, lists Montclair's businesses and organizations, but includes no real tie-in for tourists to help them easily put together a day of the arts and shopping, he said.

DestinationMontclair.com gives residents the chance to explore their own town and people from out of town the chance to come in and find out what a spectacular place Montclair is, Peskin said.
   
DestinationMontclair.com is updated about every 10 days with new events and features on what is happening in Montclair. Peskin said that it helps the smaller organizations as well as the non-profits who don't have the dollars to spend to advertise their activities each month.

The site's MACNewsFlash has just over 3,500 subscribers, he said. "Through our partnership with the Montclair Art Museum and the Wellmont, we have more than doubled the size of it in this last year," he said, adding that MAC's site and DestinationMontclair.com together garner more than 40,000 unique visitors a year.

To generate even more interest in the site, various contests have been created, such as one offering a chance to win tickets to see Bill Cosby at the Wellmont Theatre.

This generation of interest helps build up both the Web site's mailing list and also the mailing lists for many other organizations. It's easy to sign up for MAC's newsletter. If you haven't already, just head over to DestinationMontclair.com and click on "subscribe" on the left-hand side of the page.