Fund Vital Services or Use Scarce Money for Largo Entertainment?By Leo CoughlinLARGO - If the time spent on any given subject indicates its importance, Largo's Cultural Center is the obsession of most members of the City Commission. They spent an inordinate amount of time last Thursday discussing this cynosure of Largo life for the few that eats up $8,000 a week in taxpayer funds just to keep it going. The Cultural Center is Largo's white elephant, and when it comes to the commission it is always the gorilla in the room but never discussed - until last Thursday. At a work session on the budget, the commission gathered to hear the "round table" spending opinion results. That is, what citizens thought should be pared and what should be spared. After Amy Davis, the city's budget guru, laid out how plans were inching forward to make the $3.5 million in budget cuts that are needed (which included the bad news that the ad valorem tax base is going to be down by about 13 percent), and commissioners started talking about what to do, what to do, Commissioner Curtis Holmes mentioned the gorilla in the room. "The Cultural Center is getting eight thousand dollars a week," Holmes said, and then added the clincher - "Where is it going?" That stopped his colleagues dead in their tracks and resulted in a few jaws being dropped around the table in City Hall's community room. Holmes said that he had examined the finances of the center and that "counting everything," the center appeared to be making money, "so where is eight thousand a week going?" Henry Schubert, the always nervous Assistant City Manager, said the money went to "Overhead, management, bills, other costs." To that, Holmes said, "We're talking of making cuts in the police and fire budgets…We need to take a serious look at paying for entertainment versus public safety." Later in the meeting, commissioners launched into a long discussion of particulars at the Cultural Center focusing on food and beverages and how this could raise money and how many bartenders are needed to dole out the wine, etc. But Holmes persisted in his question - "We really need to take a look at this. We can't cut public safety (spending) for this kind of (entertainment)." Holmes said he was not in favor of "removing all joy from Largo," but he was opposed to "taking someone's tax money paid to the city to pay for someone else's entertainment." One of the drawbacks to the Cultural Center as a white elephant is that it accommodates only a relatively few (about 275) patrons for the shows that are presented there. The simple arithmetic rules out getting a money making performance at a price that is reasonable. In addition to that, the 275 that do show up for performances are generally the same 275 people again and again. Thus, the Cultural Center exists for the few - it has long been a hobby horse for the commission who seem to support the center for a small coterie of the privileged. To illustrate the mind set in Largo that the city exists - at least in part - to supply entertainment for the citizenry, Norton Craig, the city manager, in justifying dollars for fun, said, "Most of the people in the city don't get much for their taxes. This entertainment is part of being a city." Of course, that overlooks the basic idea that the city is there to provide services - police, fire and rescue, water, sewer, trash pickup, streets and roads, etc., and elaborates on the idea that while the Cultural Center exists for the few other delights must be provided for the hoi polloi. There's nothing like budget crunch time to reveal other little odds and ends that betray bad judgment and questionable spending. Each year at Christmas the city spends some $25,000 to give city employees credit at a local grocery chain. When the expenditure - a $25 gift card to each employee - was questioned, one commissioner, Harriet Crozier, and Craig were almost apoplectic and said many of the employees "count on it." If there are city employees who "count on" getting $25 worth of free groceries once a year, something is very wrong somewhere.
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