‘This is a crisis’: Miami-Dade mayor warns funding fix for the arts is short term

Miami-Dade’s arts community can breathe a sigh of relief. For now.

After weeks of outrage over a budget proposal to cut arts grants funding and eliminate the county’s cultural affairs department, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava met with hundreds of arts leaders and community members Tuesday night for a virtual town hall to share some news they’d want to hear. The mayor’s newest proposal restores “nearly” all arts and cultural programming grants and preserves the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs as is.

Speaking to an audience of about 700 people who tuned into the meeting, Levine Cava said it’s now up to the county commissioners to accept or deny her proposal. Commissioners meet Wednesday for a budget workshop where they are expected to discuss the amended budget. The public will be able to speak on the budget at the Miami-Dade commission meetings on Sept. 4 and Sept. 18.

“You have been very effective at organizing,” Levine Cava said during the town hall. “Your voices have been heard near and far at every single budget hearing or town hall, through the commission, through the media and so on. And that matters because you are unified.”

The mayor’s original spending plan for 2026 stripped most of the county’s funding for nonprofits, including a roughly $12 million cut in arts grants. Even more shocking for local arts organizations and artists, the mayor also proposed to eliminate the nationally renowned Department of Cultural Affairs as its own entity and consolidate it with the county’s library system.

Arts and culture nonprofit leaders quickly mobilized to for the mayor to reconsider, and Levine Cava said she heard them loud and clear.

“I am very, very happy that we’ve been able to find some stop gap measures,” Levine Cava said.

‘Newly identified and recovered funds’

To the relief of many arts lovers, Levine Cava said she is “committed to maintaining an independent [Cultural Affairs] department.” The mayor’s office also recouped about $66 million to go toward programs the original proposal stripped away, including $11.5 million for the arts and cultural grants, Levine Cava announced in a memo Tuesday. The “newly identified and recovered funds” consists of $33.2 million that the Constitutional Offices did not spend this fiscal year, $26 million from the Tax Collector’s Office and $6.6 million from other departmental adjustments.

But Levine Cava’s good news came with a caveat: “This is short term money. This is not recurring money,” she said. That means there’s no guarantee the arts will be spared from cuts in the future.

The mayor, who has described this budget cycle as “devasting,” blamed the county’s budget woes on a “perfect storm” that includes high inflation and the state legislature’s cut on sales tax, resulting in a loss of $200 million, she said. Brian May, the Cultural Affairs Council Chairman, acknowledged the difficult circumstances and commended Levine Cava on the updated proposal.

“It’s not perfection, but it is certainly 150% better than where we were just a few weeks ago,” May said during the meeting.

Local arts organizations and artists are still reeling from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ surprise veto of all state arts grant funding last year, which yanked $32 million from nonprofits statewide.

But the pain didn’t stop there. Last year, Miami-Dade arts organizations found themselves in a similar situation when the county cut $950,000 from its arts budget. (The mayor had previously proposed cutting $2.5 million, but restored some of the money after public outcry.)

To further add to the crunch, the Trump administration canceled hundreds of National Endowment of the Arts grants in May. Meanwhile, Miami artists are being priced out of their homes and studio spaces thanks to soaring rent.

‘Entirely unsustainable’

The cumulative cuts have been disastrous for small and mid-sized organizations who struggled to save their employees’ jobs and keep the lights on, said Beth Boone, the artistic and executive director of Miami Light Project and co-founder of the Miami Cultural Coalition.

“It’s hard enough to survive one single cut from one single source, but when you get hit two, three, four, five times from different line items, that becomes entirely unsustainable. It poses an existential threat to arts organizations,” Boone told the Herald. “A hostile funding environment exists.”

While she was heartened by Levine Cava’s amended proposal, Boone is concerned about fighting the same battle next year. Since the mayor’s proposal was announced last month, Boone said she’s spent all day every day advocating to restore the funding and save the Cultural Affairs department.

“That leaves no time for all of the other things that I have to do to program and run an organization and make contracts with artists,” Boone said. “That is part of the concern that I and my colleagues have. It is not sustainable for us to have to go through this year in and year out. Our work is valuable. Our work is important.”

Boone brought up her concern with Levine Cava during the town hall. The mayor had a sobering response.

“We’re living in a new world. We’re not going to see restoration of federal dollars anytime soon, nor significant state dollars, and the county is not growing at the rate that it was,” Levine Cava said. “We enjoyed a time of great money, and we had a huge amount of federal support that is now gone and is not coming back. So when you say, ‘What are we doing about it,’ I would say, ‘What are we all doing?’ This is a crisis.”

And though arts groups left the meeting with a glimmer of hope, Wednesday morning a group called Arts Action Miami hosted a protest outside a county commission meeting, demanding the new budget be passed and that the arts not be “treated as optional.”

Though it remains to be seen what will become of the budget, arts leaders who spoke during the Tuesday evening town hall expressed their appreciation for the mayor’s efforts. Instead of asking a question during the town hall, Johann Zeitsman, the president and CEO of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, shared a story.

Zeitsman, who was born in South Africa and lead arts institutions in major cities around the world, said he got a lot of flack from colleagues when he decided to move to Florida. But, he would argue, Miami-Dade County is a place that prioritizes the arts like no other county. He wishes he could show those people Tuesday night’s town hall.

“When people ask me ‘what the heck am I doing down here,’ I have one more story to tell with great pride tonight,” Zeitsman said to the mayor. “I was worried for a moment that we were walking away from that, but thank you for bringing us back to being a really proud county that stands for what this community wants.”

This story was originally published August 20, 2025 at 5:42 AM.