Oversight for arts funds

Penticton’s Mayor Andrew Jakubeit says following the failure of the PenMar Theatre reboot, the major lesson for the city is greater oversight on arts investments.

Over the summer, city staff will be introducing a tool to determine how best to invest in the arts, taking into account things like risk and whether the investment is a one-off grant or continued investment over years.

While councillors are quick to point to several success stories of events and arts initiatives city hall has invested in, the PenMar stands out as what appeared to be a good investment but eventually turned bad.

“Typically in the past if something gets approved, there’s a resolution, and our accounting office will sign off a check, or provide the in-kind, and off the society or group goes,” Jakubeit said on this week’s Mayor’s Minute. “If there’s a bit more oversight, maybe it mitigates the risk.”

Jakubeit invoked the old adage that “hindsight is always 20/20” on the topic, noting that the project had a great deal of community support all the way through, and the process appeared to be going smoothly.

“You could have said, ‘Well why didn’t you wait until the theatre’s reconfigured or rebuilt, and then get the projector, then get the seats,’” Jakubeit said. “I think the seats, they found a deal, and so they wanted to jump on that deal.”

Those seats were going for under $100 at the time, when seats usually cost two or three times more than that, according to Jakubeit.

“That’s sort of sometimes the rub of in terms of jumping on early,” he said. “You just sort of look back and look at what we can do differently.”

That, he said, should be some level of more oversight than before, but only to a reasonable level.

“We don’t want to sit there and micromanage things either, but I think if you’re going to get funding from the city, then you need to expect a little bit of oversight,” Jakubeit said.

“That’s something we need to do a bit more diligently, I think, in the future.”