Outline:

Testimony of Bruce Fraser, Executive Director, Connecticut Humanities Council before the Appropriation Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly, February 16, 2005 in support of a return to FY 2000 funding levels for the Humanities Council

Senator Harp, Representative Merrill, members of the Committee:

My name is Bruce Fraser. I direct the Connecticut Humanities Council and with your permission I'd like to deliver bundled testimony this evening in deference both to the hour and the many other groups here tonight hoping to plead their case.

And if I may I'd like to reduce the written testimony and materials before you to ONE basic point, both for clarity, and in a probably vain attempt to escape the gong here for the first time in seventeen years….

I'm speaking on behalf of the Heritage Coalition, an advocacy association composed of the Humanities Council, the League of Connecticut History Organizations, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Association for the Study of Connecticut History, the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and Connecticut Preservation Action - all statewide heritage organizations concerned with the decreased funding levels proposed for heritage programming in the Governor's budget.

The One point we want to leave you with is a simple one: History matters.

History is vitally important to us as a state – it defines our very “Connecticut-ness” and underpins the remarkable “sense of place” so precious to many of our towns.

The perception surfaces from time to time in the flashier sectors of our cultural life that the history crowd are the Canadians of culture. They look at us in the same we sometimes look at Canadians – like us, but dull. (You want an exciting weekend – go to New York. You want to spend three days in a deep coma – go to Ottawa…

If that's a legislative perception as well, I want to put it to rest right now.

If we're dull, the people of Connecticut like dull. A recent Tourism Division study concluded that THE most popular cultural activity engaged in by the people of this state was the visitation of historic sites, heritage institutions, historical societies and other venues that tell our story.

The same study concluded that an interest in our rich past, a desire to experience our distinctive “sense of place” - is the primary cultural motivator for our visitors to come here, and once here our visitors ‘do history” more than any other cultural activity. That enthusiasm of theirs turns into a significant economic benefit for the state's hotels, restaurants, shops and entertainment venues as the initial handout in my testimony packet makes clear.

We're NOT the country cousins of culture. We're significant, central players in the cultural life of this state.

And yet, state support for the Humanities Council and the heritage programs it makes possible in the over 300 non profit heritage organizations across the state will have declined by almost a half a million dollars in the past four years if the Governor's budget recommendation is adopted.

That regression is utterly out of synch with what our people do with their cultural time and what they value, and it's utterly out of synch with the major contributing role we play in the tourism industry. With new leadership on this committee, across the legislature, and in the cultural community itself in the form of Jen Aniskovich and the Commission on Culture, we think it's time to turn that situation around.

We've been enthusiastic partners of the CCT since its inception in great measure because of the incisive, fair and balanced approach Jen and the Commission have taken in setting priorities for our cultural life (if you haven't read her just announced strategic plan yet you should. It gets right to the heart of our cultural situation here and is quite brilliant in many ways) and we absolutely support the recommendations she made to you in her testimony this morning.

The heritage folks recognize that we don't stand alone – our work intersects every day with that of the state's arts and tourism organizations and what hurts one of us reverberates through all of us in the end. Good politics is about addition, not subtraction, and we share the concerns of the arts folks and the tourism advocates about the impact of this budget on their work.

We welcome, in particular, the Commission's stated goal of eventual parity of appropriation between the arts and the history/heritage/humanities sides of our cultural life. This reflects, at last, the reality of our cultural lives here in Connecticut,

We hope that as you frame your budget for the coming fiscal year you'll embrace that goal and take a first step toward it by restoring the appropriation of the Humanities Council to $1.4 million – a level it enjoyed four years ago. We'll make that money work hard for you, as the materials appended to my written testimony describing our most recent grants and the extraordinary leveraging of financial and volunteer resources in the community they produce make clear.