MidTown Cleveland
A mural in AsiaTown
Residents on Tuesday passed Issue 55 by a wide margin, with about 72% supporting a tax hike on cigarettes and tobacco products to continue to fund the arts through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.
The independent government entity will now receive more money from the revised tax—three-and-a-half cents more per smoke, up from its current tax rate of one-and-a-half cents — to turn over to artists and arts groups through grants. With smoking rates decreasing, annual funding had dipped from $20 million to $10 million over the past two decades.
Jill Paulsen, the executive director of the CAC, said that Tuesday’s win is proof that support of arts crosses party lines in Cuyahoga County.
“I think voters and residents have felt a difference of public funding be injected into this community,” she said. “We know 300 nonprofits are operating in every single zip code. And I think that really shined through.”
“I’m really jumping up and down right now,” said Jeremy Johnson, CEO of Assembly for the Arts, which receives funding from the CAC, said Tuesday night. “Even just this past weekend, [we had] events that are free and open to the public. And if you look the details, you see, ‘Made possible by the voters of Cuyahoga County.’
“These are jobs. Kids being educated. Neighborhoods being invested in,” he added.
CAC has campaigned for the added revenue—which has been down 50 percent since the mid-aughts as smoking rates have decreased—with a similar energy as the Cleveland Schools campaigning to sell Issue 49. A new tobacco levy could, they said, add a whopping $160 million to the agency in the next decade.
Meaning arts programs backed by the CAC will be funded, Paulsen said, through 2035.
That’s money that could go to hundreds of Cleveland-area arts organizations that rely on grant dollars to run and grow, from dancers at the Cleveland Balle, to orchestras like Apollo’s Fir, to urban designers like LAND Studio or actors at Great Lakes Theater.
Issue 55’s tax adds onto the one voters approved in 2015, itself a hike from CAC’s first cigarette levy in 2006. Proponents of the measure say that it’s a win-win for both the city’s arts scene and its fight against tobacco usage; opponents see the tax as unnecessarily regressive and biased against the county’s poor.
But Organizations like the World Health Organization say added tobacco taxes are a key way to lower deaths from lung and heart disease, which often stem from years of smoking. “Tobacco taxation is the single most effective measure for reducing tobacco consumption and its associated health burden worldwide,” its website reads.
“I think that’s part of the message, that’s not the only message,” Johnson said. “It’s not one versus the other; it’s a combination of factors.”
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