I'd like to call the order of city council study session of March 24th, 2026.

Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Deputy Mayor Bushnell.

Present.

Councilmember Diaz.

Councilmember Hines, absent.

Councilmember Palmer.

Councilmember Rumba.

Here.

Councilmember Sidalgay.

Councilmember Scott.

Here.

Councilmember Walker.

Here.

Mayor Ibsen, absent.

All right, thank you.

And just uh Councilmember Sidalgi, you're really uh light on the mic, and I'm not sure if that's us or you, so just a heads up on that.

All right, our first.

Yep.

Perfect.

There we go.

Thank you.

Uh, our first agenda item is Tacoma Creates spending plan, and I would like to call on Arts and Cultural Vitality Division Manager Rebecca Salverson to begin the presentation.

Thank you.

Uh Deputy Mayor, Council members, um, thanks for um for talking to us today.

My name is Rebecca Salverson.

I'm the division manager for the Arts and Cultural Vitality Division within community and economic development.

Good afternoon.

I'm Lisa Jarrett, program manager for Tacoma.

Oh, thank you.

I'm the program manager for Tacoma Creates, Lisa Jarrett.

We're excited to be here today to share an overview of our proposed spending plan for the upcoming Tacoma Creates program year, which will run from July 2026 through June 2027.

As a reminder, Tacoma Creates is the City of Tacoma's cultural access program that funds nonprofit arts, culture, heritage, and science organizations.

Each year we bring, we also bring a year in review presentation to council through the economic development committee to report back on the incredible work that's supported in the community through this funding, and we'll be doing that present uh the that presentation in the fall.

Today's presentation is focused on the upcoming year's proposed spending plan.

And this is a new presentation we're making today.

I wanted to share, I wanted to start by sharing why we're bringing this to you.

So you can see this will be the most boring slide, I promise, that we share, maybe, hopefully.

Um, when the code was updated last October, the section on the screen was added.

This new code language directs us to present our spending plan for the year ahead, including any one-time funds.

So we're sharing this prior to allocating funds to cultural organizations this year.

This presentation is meant to share information with council and the general public, and no council action is required by code.

As a reminder, Tacoma Creates funds are very restricted and can't be spent for any purpose other than what's outlined in the code.

And I'm gonna hand it over to Lisa to share some brief background and our spending plan and some great photos of the amazing work that we uh that we support.

Tacoma Creates was launched through a community effort in 2018 and a very successful public vote with a 67% approval.

And then our second seven years was secured just last October with the councilmanic vote.

The primary use of funds is to contract with eligible local nonprofit organizations with the primary purpose of arts, culture, heritage, or science.

Our funding goals are around supporting public programs and youth education programs in arts, culture, heritage, and science, with a focus on increasing access and supporting programming by and for historically underrepresented communities and supporting the sustainability of the cultural sector.

Funding to organizations is approved by the Tacoma Creates Advisory Board, and we have a couple of key partnerships that I wanted to mention here.

Tacoma Public Schools and Tacoma Public Library really expand the reach of the programming and amplify the impact of this funding.

In our most recently completed program year, which was July 2024 to June 2025, we contracted with 69 cultural organizations for a total of about six million dollars.

This includes Tacoma's major well-known cultural organizations with multimillion dollar budgets, and it also includes a majority of organizations, our smaller community-based organizations with budgets of less than 250,000.

These organizations reached over a million participants through nearly 1,500 programs and events, most of which were free.

The ones that aren't free usually have some kind of uh reduced price or scholarship option.

If you're interested in more details on last year's program, our full annual report is on our website.

We have a uh our funding comes from uh sales tax, one-tenth of one percent, and we have a deferred income model, a deferred spending model, where the revenue received in one program year is spent in the following program year.

And we have a reserves and fund balance policy.

Over the first couple of years of the program, we built up reserves with guidance from finance and in alignment with city practices, and these funds are protected for emergency use only.

The reserve amount is 20% of projected revenue.

When there are underspent funds at the end of a program year, they go to what we call our fund balance above reserves.