Last week was a blur of proposals and counterproposals, meetings and conferences between the Governor's Office, Mark Ryan at OPM, the CCA's Doug Evans, the legislative leaders' House/Senate "working group" headed by House Deputy Speaker Melody Currey, assorted lobbyists for all sides and members of the Heritage Coalition. At week's end, we think we now have a compromise that satisfactorily addresses the divergent expectations and needs of all parties. The "working group" is now drafting legislation implementing and funding that agreement and hopes to run it in the House and Senate next week. Should this measure pass, the hope of the "working group," and indeed of us all, is that it will stand as the initial budgeting piece of the
state's FY04 budget and escape the end-of-session horse-trading that has so regularly dashed our hopes in the past.

The essential understandings are these:

1) The state's cultural activities will be reorganized under a new Commission on "Arts, Culture, Tourism and History" (CCATCH) staffed by an executive director. That entity will be composed of current state cultural organizations (the Arts Commission, Tourism Office, Film Commission and Historical Commission) and the state's major non-profit cultural grant-makers (the Humanities Council and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation) as equal partners. The Commission itself will be composed of 14-18 individuals appointed by the Governor and legislative leadership who will equally represent the separate constituencies of the participating groups. The Trust and the Humanities Council will continue to exist as separate autonomous organizations linked to the Commission for strategic planning purposes and for fiscal administration.

2) All parties recognize the necessity for a continued independence of the preservation regulatory functions of the Historical Commission and a process will be set up in the bill to ensure that autonomy.

3) Funding for the granting programs of the Humanities Council will be restored.

4) Funding for the Historical Commission's four historic properties will be restored.

God, as always, is in the details, and the legislation implementing these agreements and establishing funding allocations for the partners is still being written. We should have a more specific sense of how all this will shake out early next week, but at this point the Coalition is quite delighted with the results of our labors. Like Lazarus, we've come back from the dead...

We'll keep you posted.