Finally, more details on Madison’s largest arts subsidy

How the Overture Center uses its annual chunk of City money.

Two years ago, I wrote and reported an in-depth story about the Overture Center for the Arts’ relationship with the City of Madison. The financial component of that relationship is evolving—or maybe all too routine, depending on how you look at it. Overture began its life 20 years ago as a City-operated venue, then became a private non-profit which the City is still on the hook to subsidize annually. In a typical budget year, that subsidy dwarfs any other City funding item related to the arts. The City’s recently finalized 2025 operating budget allocates $2.2 million for Overture, only a slight bump from its 2024 subsidy of $2.18 million. A “structural agreement” between Overture and the City of Madison calls for an annual outlay of $2,365,000, but that figure has no legal teeth. Anyways, at this point we’re comfortably in the low two million-ish neighborhood pending an economic crisis or a shift in Madison’s political winds.

The really important thing I wanted to point out in that 2022 story is that for years, Overture never gave the public or the City a straight answer about how, specifically, it spends those public dollars. We didn’t have segregated accounting (as the financial lingo calls it) to break down how much of the City’s subsidy goes to any given purpose. Overture leaders and spokespeople over the years have variously said that the subsidy funds the center’s general operational and capital expenses, while also drawing a rhetorical connection between that funding and free or low-cost community programming. Overture has certainly given the City lots of documents and financial reports over the years, but none of them answered that particular question in a clear way. 

That is quite an obstacle if you really want to understand what we’re getting for our money. It has long frustrated, well, those few people who pay attention. The itch we need to scratch here doesn’t have to do with anyone hiding anything or doing anything wrong. (In my reporting, I’ve found Overture officials to be pretty responsive to financial questions, and willing to acknowledge complaints about their documentation. I don’t always get the exact answers I’m seeking, but not because anyone’s being evasive.) It’s about understanding the purpose of the subsidy and understanding how Overture carries out that purpose. The better grasp we have on all that, the fuller the conversation we can have about Madison’s paltry public arts funding—how we divide it up, what our priorities are, what our goals are. (In this story I’m using “public arts funding” to refer specifically to local governments’ arts-related budget items, not to private organizations that position themselves as “public art” projects. I’m also setting aside, for now, the State of Wisconsin’s absolutely abysmal level of support for the arts, which doesn’t help the local picture but also doesn’t absolve municipal governments of their obligation to provide more funding through better mechanisms.)

So it’s only fair to point out that things changed this fall. Overture gave the Madison Arts Commission (MAC) a long-awaited financial breakdown in October, ahead of a meeting at which MAC reviewed the annual contract between Overture and the City. 

Here it is, accompanying a 14-page report that provides more context. The one-page financial appendix breaks down $2,137,500 in City funds Overture used in its 2024 fiscal year. (Note that Overture’s fiscal year ends June 30, while the City’s just follows the calendar year, hence why this doesn’t align with the full $2.18 million budgeted for 2024.) 

The short version is that about $1.1 million of that went toward salaries, wages, benefits, and payroll taxes. That number encompasses Overture’s full-time employees as well as stagehands and so forth. I asked Overture how it parses out some of those wage line items—you’ll notice six different ones. Chris Vogel, co-CEO and Chief Financial Officer, explains that each represents a different group of employees, i.e. there aren’t any duplicates here or any employees whose pay is divided among different categories. In plain English, the first “salaries and wages” line represents funds that go toward paying Overture’s core administrative staff. “The wages in the [full-time] and [part-time] community programming lines include full time employees that administer our Educational & Engagement programs, but also part-time employees that have roles, such as teaching artists or reviewers,” Vogel says. “Wages in the Security/Ushers/Stagehands are from variable employees that work directly on an Educational or Engagement event, such as a school OnStage show, a Kids in the Rotunda performance, or the Jerry Awards show.” 

Of the remaining $1.08 million, $531,577 went toward upgrading the rigging systems in Overture Hall, $199,047 for a lighting console upgrade, $184,075 toward installing a water softener (a crowd pleaser for all you pragmatic Midwestern dads out there! Durned city-water minerals’ll muck up yer plumbing to kingdom come!), and then $110,424 to defray the cost of utilities.

So back to one of the peskier questions in my 2022 story: Is the City’s subsidy for Overture’s general expenses, or for the community programming? The report Overture submitted this fall states that the 2024 City grant was used for general operations and capital expenditures, “allowing Overture to further invest and expand many of the Education and Engagement Programs described below.” (Italics mine.) Ah! A most elegant way to thread the needle. 

Note that MAC has no real power over Overture’s funding; that comes from the City’s Room Tax Commission, which doles out money from hotel taxes, and basically has the final say over its bit of the City’s annual operating budget. MAC can’t yank on the pursestrings in any meaningful way. Neither can the Madison Common Council, even though it technically approves the budgets and contracts the Commission creates. A Scott Walker-era change in state law forces local governments to spend at least 70 percent of room-tax revenues on “tourism promotion and tourism development.” The hotel industry lobbied in favor of the change in 2015, over the protests of local governments around the state that were used to dipping into the room-tax coffers to fund basic services. 

Legal, open self-dealing is baked right into the Room Tax Commission. State law requires it to include at least one ​​representative from the hotel industry. And City ordinance expresses a preference that the alders on the Commission be “alderpersons who serve on the boards of the Monona Terrace, Overture Center, and Greater Madison Convention and Visitor Bureau”—the three entities that get the most room-tax funding. Despite what Commission members or the City’s Attorney’s office might tell you, this does in fact create a blatant conflict of interest. 

But MAC members over the years, along with City of Madison Arts Program Administrator Karin Wolf, have pushed for more detailed reporting from Overture, and this development suggests they’re finally making progress.

This doesn’t tell us anything surprising or earth-shattering. It gives us a baseline that would have been nice to have all along. Something to dig into, something to contest. The subsidy makes up only about 6 percent of the annual revenue Overture cites in its latest annual report. Then again, it’s certainly more than any other individual artist or arts organization can count on from the City, especially not on a rubber-stamp basis. Not a lot of people actually participate in the public conversation about this, at least not at the point where decisions are actually made. But if we push Overture to keep doing these, and preferably offer more detailed reports in the future, maybe we can open up that conversation.