What’s at stake?
After an ex-Fresno Arts Council employee embezzled almost $2 million in art grant money, the City of Fresno has taken over administration of the annual Measure P competitive grants. But does it need a new department to do so effectively? Here’s what experts say.
Out of California’s eight largest cities, Fresno is the only one that doesn’t have a department or office focused on arts and cultural affairs.
Local arts advocate Amy Kitchener has been reminding people of that fact for months.
And now that the Fresno Arts Council is out of the picture when it comes to administering the city’s multimillion-dollar annual arts grant program funded by Measure P, Kitchener and others say it’s high time for that to change.
“The idea is that there’s personnel — senior personnel — at the city level who have a really deep understanding of the arts and cultural ecology of Fresno,” said Kitchener, who leads the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. “That’s the missing piece here.”
Though it looks different from city to city, introducing something like this in Fresno would transition the city from working with arts professionals outside of city government to administer arts and culture programs to actually hiring those arts professionals to oversee that work from inside City Hall.
The benefit of this model, versus outsourcing to an external agency like a local arts council, comes down to access, said California for the Arts Board President Jonathon Glus.
He’s worked across both models and sees advantages to both.
“When you are outside of City Hall, you have more flexibility — especially in a state like California, where there’s a lot of restrictions on municipal governance,” he said. “You can respond to needs in the community relatively quickly, and if that outside organization is functioning well, then leadership can very easily have a seat at the table with other civic leaders.
“What you don’t have,” Glus added, “that you do have inside City Hall, is access to the many departments and the many, many, many fundings streams and mechanisms inside City Hall that can be leveraged to support the arts.”
But can something that sounds good on paper actually make a difference? Or rebuild trust after the Fresno Arts Council’s $1.82 million embezzlement scandal shattered an already strained relationship between the local arts community and the bureaucratic systems determining who among them gets taxpayer funding?
Others are open to the idea, but still have their reservations about City Hall’s own track record when it comes to transparency.
For LAByrinth Art Collective co-founder Alicia Rodriguez, it’s not the concept of a dedicated department focused on arts and culture that gives her pause. It’s the fact that it would run through the city.
The most recent blow to trust among Rodriguez and other members of a coalition demanding greater transparency around arts funding came at a city council meeting in June.
At that meeting, councilmembers voted 6-1 to place a $350,000 cap on grant awards for larger-budget arts organizations in the next cycle of Measure P grants.
That decision defied a recommendation from the city’s Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission to instead place that cap at $150,000 — which advocates for the city’s most under-resourced arts organizations said would’ve helped set aside more of the pot for them to expand access to arts and culture. The city’s larger-budget arts and culture organizations, on the other hand, pushed for the higher cap, saying that funding can help stabilize their operations.
“The city is hard to trust,” Rodriguez said. “It’s because specifically their actions don’t match their words. We’ve seen, time and again, power outweighing public desire. You’ll have roomfuls of dissent or support for an action or a motion or an issue, and the city council will do whatever they like.
“It sounds great. Theoretically and conceptually, yeah,” Rodriguez added regarding the Cultural Affairs Department idea. “We’re one of the only cities that doesn’t have one of these, and (if) other cities that do have these are seeing tangible results in their arts and culture landscapes, then that would be encouraging. Now, can Fresno do that? Only if the people are in charge of that process — not tokenized or used. In charge of,” she emphasized.
There’s also no cookie-cutter version of this kind of structure within a city — it looks different anywhere you go, appearing under different names with varying staff sizes and placement within a city’s org chart.
But with Fresno City Hall holding the reins for the foreseeable future, and with decades left of the 30-year tax revenue funding the grants, there’s a long runway to shape what the future of arts administration in Fresno could look like.
Most large cities in California have dedicated city staff on cultural affairs
Excluding Fresno, the state’s seven other largest cities by population — Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland — all have a city office, division or department focused on administering arts and cultural affairs.
But they come in all different shapes and sizes. Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs has almost 100 people on the payroll in the proposed budget for 2026-2027. Oakland has a much smaller team within the city’s Economic & Workforce Development Department that’s hovered around five people in recent years.
Some cities, like Oakland, similarly house their arts staff within economic development departments, like San Jose. In Sacramento, their Office of Arts and Culture is a division of their Department of Convention and Cultural Services. In Long Beach, the Cultural Affairs Manager is located in the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture.
But the bottom line, says Roberto Bedoya — Oakland’s former Cultural Affairs Manager — is that you have folks at City Hall who know their local arts and culture landscape inside and out and understand how to support it with city resources.
“If you don’t have that expertise in City Hall,” he said, “it’s a deficiency that will come back to haunt you.”
It’s also not just the managers or directors of these programs themselves advocating to maintain arts and culture experts in-house.
In 2025, Oakland’s arts community successfully fought to resurrect the Cultural Affairs Manager position after the city council had previously moved to axe it during an intense round of budget cuts.
Community members who protested Oakland’s cuts to the Office of Cultural Affairs emphasized the importance of the external funding that Bedoya helped attract to the city in his role prior to his retirement, especially since the city was allocating less than 1% of its total budget to the department and its public art programs. In Los Angeles, the local arts community also organized a petition to protest cuts to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, fearing impacts to programming at art centers around the city.
Bedoya was stunned to hear that a city like Fresno — with such a bounty of arts and culture — didn’t already have a department like this at City Hall.
Bedoya was also skeptical about the decision for this grant cycle to task the city’s PARCS Department (i.e. Parks, After School, Recreation and Community Services) with helping manage the grants in the immediate.
“To respect the cultural community you’re meant to serve, I think it needs an individual that understands the diversity of that cultural community that you’re supporting,” he said, “whether it’s large-budget institutions or neighborhood arts centers, individual artists, community members who are deeply invested in the cultural community, cultural expression.
“Maybe there’s somebody in Parks and (Rec) that has that already,” he added, “but their expertise is probably related to athletics and maintenance … rather than the cultural voice of the city. You need somebody that knows that.”
Glus also emphasized the importance of having arts professionals run arts grantmaking — the same way a city would hire folks with expertise in the economy to run an economic development department.
“It’s not simply processing contracts or grants,” he said. “It’s about the long-term sustainability of a field. You have to have people who understand the health and vitality and the needs of the sector. If you’re managing public funds and you don’t have staff that understand that, then you’re not managing your public funds well.”
In Long Beach, the Cultural Affairs Officer position is a lot newer — going on seven months, to be exact.
Griselda Suarez was tapped to become the city’s inaugural Cultural Affairs Officer in February 2026. Before that, she led Long Beach’s Arts Council for a decade. She’s also a poet and writer.
The road to creating her position in the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture took a few years, Suarez said. A key part of that was a feasibility study Long Beach’s city council contracted with a consulting firm to conduct in December 2024.
“I participated as a community member when the study was happening and was in the room with many of our cultural leaders, who were like: ‘We’ve been doing this work. … How are we going to continue, and what are you going to change?’” Suarez said. “And so the concerns were there.”
But following robust engagement with both community members and city leaders, the study established a “clear path towards better coordination of arts and culture initiatives,” said Cathy De Leon, who directs the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture, in a statement.
“The study helped to inform budget development and organizational change, for example the addition of a Cultural Affairs Division to Library Services,” De Leon added, “and investments in staffing were able to be supported through the city’s FY 26 budget.”
The hope is that over the years, the Cultural Affairs Officer can shape policy to ensure “longevity, equity, and growth for arts and culture in LB,” De Leon said.
What could this look like in Fresno?
Kitchener has high hopes for what a department, division or office like this in Fresno could help deliver.
There’s the Cultural Arts Plan that the city is required to update every five years under the Measure P ordinance with an update due by 2028. But it’s not just Measure P-related tasks she’s hopeful a hypothetical department would help facilitate.
“There’s an understanding that arts and culture isn’t just kind of a nice-to-have luxury, but it can actually be a driver of social change. It can be a driver of economic development,” she said. “I think that’s where the really exciting opportunities are for Fresno.
“Another big area that a lot of the Cultural Affairs Departments work in,” she added, “is downtown revitalization.”
Glus said there’s a growing trend among city arts and culture departments to “focus on the larger creative economy” and “the small business of the arts” in terms of the services offered.
Nikiko Masumoto, a Fowler-based artist and farmer who racked up hours of canvassing in support of Measure P before it passed in 2018, said she also sees great potential for what city administration of the arts grants can accomplish.
But if the city were to go for something like a new department, a lot of it would come down to getting the right person there — or, ideally, persons, plural, she said. She’d also like to see that personnel hail from the multiple departments that arts and culture intersect with, from transportation to parks and recreation.
“I tend to believe that some of the struggles in democracy are … we actually need more people involved,” she said, “not less people.”
There’s already been some debate at PRAC meetings this year over how important it is to require an arts and culture background for the people working on this.
Masumoto said in her arts career, she’s come to believe that those credentials alone shouldn’t be seen as a guarantee someone will be a good champion for the local arts community.
“There’s plenty of people who have deep expertise in arts,” she said, “that wield the expertise to shut people out.”
Rodriguez of LAByrinth Art Collective said she’d also have concerns about conflict of interest when it comes to hiring the right person for this job. She’d want to see protocols that are “vigorous,” “transparent” and “able to be acted on by the people if something comes up.”
“If you serve on a board, or if you sponsor someone that is going to compromise your ability to be objective,” she said, “then you can’t do that.”
But she also believes, just like there’s an abundance of remarkable artists in Fresno, there’s a wealth of good candidates to lead work like this for the city.
“There are plenty of people in Fresno that are arts and culture-aware,” she said, “and immersed in community, and not compromised. We have enough folks to find. We don’t have to hand these positions to people that are just going to feed the power machine.”
Could this happen at Fresno City Hall?
At this point, it’s unclear how much of an appetite there is for a new department, division or office among the powers that be. Fresnoland reached out to the three sitting councilmembers who aren’t running for office elsewhere or on the verge of terming out this year — Council Vice President Tyler Maxwell and Councilmembers Nick Richardson and Brandon Vang.
Only Vang’s office responded, but didn’t commit one way or the other.
“I’m supportive of exploring ways to strengthen the administration of Measure P grants and learning from how other cities manage their arts programs,” Vang said in a statement. “At the same time, any future model must remain consistent with the requirements established by Measure P.
“While other cities structure their arts programs differently, the City of Fresno operates under the framework established by Measure P, which combines funding for both parks and arts programs and places oversight with the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission (PRAC),” Vang’s statement continues. “Any discussion about long-term administration should begin with that framework in mind.”
A spokesperson for Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer’s office also didn’t respond to a request for comment on the idea.
It can take several years to build out structures like this, Glus said.
But he cautioned against starting up anything new without the means to follow through in terms of funding and resources.
“The worst you can do,” he said, “is put a funding program inside a city government structure and then not have the resources to have professional staff etc. to make it efficient, accessible, transparent.”
