Article content

Mayor Naheed Nenshi has urged artists and business leaders to lobby councillors to kill a proposal that would slash the few million dollars of council’s infrastructure budget set aside for public art.

He gave a passionately pro-art message Thursday at the mayor’s annual arts award luncheon, telling the crowd he agreed with their boos when he mentioned Coun. Peter Demong’s motion, which council will debate Monday.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or 'Terribly short-sighted' — Nenshi rips bid to slash public art budget Back to video

Demong is citing the oil price crash as reason to freeze all public art spending until at least 2016, and reallocate all unused art funds from older projects.

Nenshi called that idea “terribly short-sighted” and unnecessary, since the art policy itself limits the amounts to less than one per cent of Calgary’s massive projects budget.

“If one is going to use what’s going on in the world and the very real pain that people are feeling in the community as an excuse to go after a program one never liked in the first place, there are words one can use to describe that, which I will not use,” Nenshi said to close out the afternoon awards celebration.

Council won’t know what sort of cuts the Prentice government, drowning in red ink because of plunging resource revenues, will exact from its civic infrastructure grants — though Nenshi isn’t worried about funding for projects that start this year. Nor do councillors know how many millions the city would save by killing the public art program for now, information that city officials will compile for Monday.