Live Music Fund grant payments expected this week after month-plus delay

Grant recipients from the city’s Live Music Fund pilot program were expected to receive the initial 50 percent portion of their award by today, more than a month later than they were initially told they would receive the money. The delay in the grant disbursal has caused some promoters to consider delaying or canceling the events they’d spent months planning because of the lack of funds to cover up-front costs.

At Monday’s meeting of the Music Commission, event producer Sarah Rucker said she’d gone weeks with no response from various city offices or the Long Center for the Performing Arts, which was hired as the program’s third-party administrator, regarding the next steps or timeline for receiving her money. The city had initially expected to begin awarding the $5,000 and $10,000 grants in August to the 368 selected applicants.

Rucker said she’d received her award notice in August with the suggestion that initial payments would go out in September. After receiving an initial test payment confirming her financial information from the Long Center earlier this month, she told the commission she’d received no response to inquiries about what would happen next. She told the Austin Monitor on Thursday evening that she had received her first payment.

“I have an October production I’m working on, some of my colleagues have even bigger October productions they’re working on, and we’re coming out of pocket. So the purpose for this grant is actually, not to be too extreme, but it’s destroying our businesses,” she said.“We are coming out of pocket when we expected to have funding, and we’re very confused and fearful right now because we don’t know the next steps.”

Erica Shamaly, head of the city’s Music and Entertainment Division, acknowledged that the program, which was approved by City Council four years ago, took longer than planned to set up with the Long Center.

At the Monday meeting, she told the commission the Long Center would be reaching out to recipients this week to finalize any needed documents and send out award contracts. Once signed and received, Shamaly said payments would be made to recipients the following business day.

“We wish that the process getting here didn’t take so long … but this was the initial coordination with a third party around this major $100 million contract that’s gonna last for several years, and so we had to get it right,” she said, without clarifying what administrative steps caused the delay.

“There were some things that we just had to hammer out, make sure that we were all on the same page, so that then when this day came we could say, ‘OK, you’re getting your email and these are the next steps,’ and it could go very smoothly without any questions.”

The city hired the Long Center to handle the evaluation of applicants and payments to recipients because the Music Division lacks the staff to manage the program internally. The $3.5 million program is expected to grow next year with the inclusion of music venues as eligible applicants for the grants intended to fund live events, studio productions or other music-related projects.

Commission members suggested they’d like to have representatives from the Long Center present at a future meeting to discuss the setup and execution of the pilot program.

The news of the delays follows public airing of criticism from some applicants that the program was difficult to navigate and didn’t seem intended to explicitly benefit the city’s musicians. Shamaly said her office is doing an evaluation of the initial application process and program design, with possible improvements expected to be discussed in the coming months.

Commissioner Lauryn Gould, a working musician and recipient of one of the grants, said the city needs to improve its communication with applicants and recipients, along with any other changes that are identified for the next iteration.

“It’s not even so much the delay, it’s the lack of communication around the delay,” she said. “Obviously, the delay is not good, but you’ve gotta communicate. Every single thing in life could be made better by better communication and so we’ve gotta communicate with these applicants. We’ve gotta let them know if the timeline is different than what was originally stated.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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