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Orozco, Norma From: Sandra Pocha Pena <pocha@pocharte.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2020 2:49 PM To: Pulido, Miguel; Sarmiento, Vicente; Penaloza, David; Solorio, Jose; Bacerra, Phil; Villegas, Juan; Mendoza, Nelida Cc: Ridge, Kristine; !City Clerk, eComment, City Council Subject: Item 65D - 20121 BUDGET: RE -FUND ART GRANT Importance: High RE: AN APPEAL FOR THE ARTS IN SANTA ANA Dear Mayor, City Council Members, City Manager and City Staff, As a successful professional Artist, Educator and the former Chair of the Santa Ana Arts Commission, I appeal to you for a re -funding of the annual Arts Commission's Investing in the Artist Grant. Thank you for investing in Arts & Culture these past five years as part of the Santa Ana Strategic Plan. The annual Investing in the Artist grant benefitted almost 100 artists on over 60 projects all over Santa Ana: Producing the annual Santa Ana Intl Women's Day Festival on Plaza Calle Cuatro Providing free writing classes to adults by Breath of Fire Latina Theater Co at Grand Central Creating Santa Ana's Camerata Santa Ana, a chamber music society at Santa Ana College Funding the startup of LibroMobil, a mobile bookstore and culture space in downtown Santa Ana Bringing the Philip K Dick Film Festival from New York to Santa Ana to celebrate this legendary local author Funding exhibits at VAALA, El Centro Cultural de Mexico, OCCTAC and the OC Heritage Museum ...among many others. In recent cycles each year has had a theme, like "Celebrate Santa Ana History" or "Supporting Our Seniors" which has helped target our city's creative efforts into underserved areas and populations. In the future this annual grant could fund art to celebrate the 10 communities the new OC Street Car will run through on it's route or the colorful drag race and soul music history of South Main. This annual call for art is transforming our city for the better. It needs to continue. As the City emerges from the financial ravages of COVID and must cultivate revenue in order to recover, the Arts offers some of the most growth and highest paying jobs in our region. Overall in California, the Creative sector earns more revenue for the State than Agriculture. In Southern California, the economic impact is even greater with Film/Video production, Gaming Development and Digital Design being 3 of the industries with the largest growth in Orange County. Unfortunately, Santa Ana has largely been left out of this economic surge because of our terrible infrastructure (no high- speed internet corridors, production base camps or diverse tech incubators), unsustainable high cost -of -living (housing, parking, tax rate), and lack of cultural offerings (no performing arts center, no municipal gallery and very limited arts programming). All three have been cited by major corporations like Blizzard (which develops global digital games like World Of Warcraft) as reasons why they don't want to move into Santa Ana. If we want to attract world -class industries and upwardly mobile workers, we need to provide a better Quality of Life.