Negotiations over a new agreement between the city and Arts and Heritage St.
Negotiations over a new agreement between the city and Arts and Heritage St. Albert have again spilled out into the public realm, with the group’s executive director tendering his resignation to express his displeasure with the city’s approach.
Arts and heritage announced Thursday that Paul Moulton had resigned as executive director. His final day at work on Dec. 14 will mark an end to his four-year tenure with the group.
Reached Friday, Moulton was not shy in stating the city’s approach to negotiations over a new stewardship agreement, and its shift in how it funds arts and heritage, led to his decision to resign.
“I think principally the direction the new agreement is heading in, I fundamentally disagree with,” Moulton said.
Both sides have been negotiating a new agreement for the last 18 months with little success. A meeting in late August after an acrimonious summer produced a surprising resolution to renew the agreement for another five years.
City manager Patrick Draper was asked to make “appropriate revisions” and deliver a final document to council in October. That never happened.
Those revisions, Moulton says, include completely changing how the city funds arts and heritage. Rather than using grants as it always has, the city instead wants to use a “fee for service” process in which the group only gets money after it provides reports or invoices, he said.
“That’s the piece that really, for me, is the principle that I’m not comfortable seeing changed, so I choose to exit gracefully,” Moulton said.
“If you don’t think we’re accountable and you need to put this in place, you’re saying that for the last 12 years … council has been approving grants they shouldn’t have been giving.”
Draper wouldn’t go into specifics, saying negotiations are ongoing, but confirmed there are discussions about “how money changes hands.”
“It talks about accountability and openness but it’s not about the budget envelope,” Draper said.
Mayor Nolan Crouse confirmed the city is pursuing a fee-for-service approach, but said it is doing so to increase transparency and accountability with arts and heritage.
“It’s the city having accountability to the taxpayer for the money,” Crouse said. “The city is accountable to the taxpayer for money spent.”
It was Crouse, at the August meeting, who publicly apologized for a lack of leadership over negotiations for a new agreement. The relationship between both sides had grown increasingly sour as negotiations dragged on. A public report presented over the summer raised the ire of the arts and heritage board after it implied the group, in spending more than $200,000 from its reserves, was actually in deficit to that total.
A later private council meeting that had been expected to produce a negotiating mandate instead led to a set of options, one of which included taking back the services for which arts and heritage was responsible.
Interim board chair Brent Luebke said he and the board did not want to negotiate in public but added that fee-for-service models are almost unheard of in similar arrangements.
“A fee for service model, when it comes to an arts and heritage organization, is extremely unique,” Luebke said. “It doesn’t work as far as how you need to have a funding model established and stabilized. I don’t know why we wouldn’t have a blend of something. I don’t believe it was the intent of mayor and council when they went down this path.”
The old agreement between the city and arts and heritage expires Dec. 31. Following a private in camera session on Monday, council voted publicly to approve the new draft agreement and give Draper until Jan. 14 to get arts and heritage to accept this two-week extension of the old agreement.
While much of the content of the new agreement is still confidential, Luebke hoped councillors would read the draft for themselves.
“I think if they saw some of the extreme changes, I think they would have many questions because it’s totally different than what we were operating under for the last 10 years,” Luebke said.
