By Jackie Demaline and Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A nonprofit "Cincinnati Cultural Trust" to develop and market the Tristate's museums, theaters and performing arts groups is the core of a plan now being floated in boardrooms and at Cincinnati City Hall.

The trust should be established before summer to capitalize on the opening of the new Contemporary Arts Center, Tall Stacks this fall and other cultural events, said Louise Stevens, president of ArtsMarket, the consultant hired by business and civic leaders.

"There's a clear awareness that something has to change in Cincinnati to take advantage of its arts and cultural assets," Stevens said in an interview Thursday. She spent the day here presenting the plan to city officials and arts leaders.

Despite a healthy Fine Arts Fund that raises more than $9 million a year for the city's biggest arts groups, there is no single group marketing, promoting or developing the larger arts community here, leaving Cincinnati trailing cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Indianapolis, she said.

That could endanger institutions such as the Cincinnati Museum Center, which struggles to avoid losses even as it attracts more than 1 million visitors a year, and make the city unattractive to creative people and companies it needs to keep pace in the 21st century, Stevens said.

"Let's face it, creative workers move to cities that are creative," she said. "They don't move to cities that are gray and boring and lacking that certain coolness factor."

Stevens was hired last year by the CEO group Cincinnati Business Committee and the Greater Cincinnati Foundation to produce the business case for using arts and culture to build the city's tax base.

She has compared Cincinnati's arts assets and infrastructure to other cities, finding that Columbus and Indianapolis get between $100 million and $150 million more in economic impact from their arts and culture communities than Cincinnati.

Establishing the trust, which Stevens said ideally would be funded at between $5 million and $10 million a year, probably will require new taxes, and civic leaders said they are just now studying how to fund it. That clearly is the plan's biggest roadblock.

Jim Tarbell, chairman of City Council's Arts and Culture committee, which will give $2.2 million this year to arts groups, said the environment for the arts has improved "pretty dramatically" in recent years.

"I think the chances are good'' for the cultural trust, he said. "A lot depends on how people perceive the funding mechanism."

In his State of the City speech delivered Wednesday, Mayor Charlie Luken spotlighted the importance of economic development from arts and culture.

"We are saying, saying loudly, to our region and our nation, `Come here, our arts are second to none,'" Luken said.

Others who have heard Stevens' proposals agreed that there is some need for an umbrella arts group.

"If we're seeing the needs of the arts and the needs of the city intertwine, that's important," said Ed Stern, artistic director of Playhouse in the Park.

Douglass McDonald, president of the Museum Center, said it was "important to engage in this dialogue and implement a funding mechanism that is broad-based and doesn't currently exist."

Procter & Gamble Co. executive Charlotte Otto, chairwoman of Downtown Cincinnati Inc. and of the Playhouse in the Park, said the idea is "clearly best in class."

"We are clearly behind, but we can catch up fast," she said. "By any objective measure, our arts and cultural institutions are our single biggest competitive advantage."

Stevens will return to Cincinnati this spring to continue advocating for the idea. She said the cultural trust could:

Inspire new arts programs that would appeal to a diverse audience. That was a central theme of John Alschuler, a consultant who is working on a revitalization plan for downtown Cincinnati.

Contract for a collaborative marketing campaign touting the region's arts and cultural assets. Indianapolis and other cities already are running these advertisements, while many cultural institutions cannot produce them on their own. Tall Stacks, for example, is not running a national ad campaign for its event this October.

Contract with the Greater Cincinnati Convention & Visitors Bureau for a national cultural marketing campaign.

Stimulate public art, a factor lacking in the Tristate's arts community.

Another potential issue is the Fine Arts Fund, which supports 17 local arts groups with its annual campaign. Its leaders have been reluctant to fully endorse the cultural trust proposal so far, sources said, concerned that it might divert its donor base.

"We enthusiastically support the CBC's interest in exploring ways to better leverage Cincinnati's cultural assets to market the city and increase their already significant economic impact," said Nancy Heffner Donovan, chairwoman of the Fine Arts Fund board.

Stevens said several other cities have both kinds of groups, with neither cannibalizing the other.

"The Fine Arts Fund is one of the finest in the country for what it does," she said. "The business the Fine Arts Fund is in is not the full spectrum of what needs to be done."

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com or jdemaline@enquirer.com