San Bernardino County Town Hall Unveils Creative Economy Plan, Pressing Arts as Jobs Amid Low Funding

Alejandro Gutierrez Chavez opened a San Bernardino County town hall on the creative economy with a challenge: treat arts and culture as essential infrastructure — and match celebration with responsibility.

“As artists, culture bearers, educators, and community partners that are here today, we have a shared responsibility not to acknowledge it, but to work for accountability and support Indigenous sovereignty and uplifting Native voices, artists and culture bearers,” said Gutierrez Chavez, executive director of Arts Connection, the Arts Council of San Bernardino County.

The “Creative Economies in Action: Statewide Engagement Tour” stop was held Wednesday, Jan. 7, at the West End Educational Service Center in Rancho Cucamonga, bringing together the California Arts Council and California for the Arts with local partners including Arts Connection, the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

Gutierrez Chavez told the room that creativity is not confined to galleries or stages in the Inland Empire, but shows up “in the classrooms, our neighborhoods, our public spaces like parks, trails, bus benches, and small businesses,” woven into how the region understands itself. At the same time, he described the daily strain he sees among artists and cultural workers who keep creating while working long hours in an economy shaped by logistics and warehousing.

“I work with artists and culture barriers every day and I see them juggling multiple jobs, working from nine to five, working late nights, whether it’s in the most dominant industries such as the warehouse industry, logistics industries,” he said. “And they still make time for their creative careers because they know the value that their work has for our communities.”

From there, state leaders positioned the gathering as part of a broader push to convert that local reality into statewide policy and investment — with a plan they said is meant to drive concrete outcomes, not sit on a shelf.

Rebecca Ratzkin, equity measures and evaluation manager at the California Arts Council, told attendees the strategic plan was not optional.

“So doing this plan actually wasn’t a choice,” Ratzkin said. “It was legislatively mandated.”

Ratzkin said lawmakers funded the California Arts Council to assemble a Creative Economy workgroup “made up of experts from across different sectors of the creative economies and across the entire state,” and required the agency to produce a strategic plan based on that cross-sector work.

She laid out the plan’s goals as a mix of economic development and equity commitments: “To attract Creative Economy business, retain talent within the state,” she said, adding, “So attraction, retention, growth.” The plan also focuses on “sustaining, developing marketable content that can be exported for national and international consumption,” which she described as a strategy “to actually generate revenue.”

Ratzkin added that the plan is also designed to ensure participation and benefits extend to communities historically left out of state investment. The goals include “to make sure that we’re reaching marginalized communities, that we’re living up to our race, equity promise as a state, and to incorporate the diversity of the multiple perspectives of communities across the state.”

Ratzkin described the plan’s development as a phased process. Phase one, she said, built the framework — including establishing the workgroup and partnering with Institute for the Future, a nonprofit consultant, to guide the work through a “foresight, insight and action” methodology.

She said background research and statewide listening fed into workgroup meetings in 2024, and that the state moved into generating and consolidating action ideas in 2025 — ultimately submitting the report with the governor’s approval in summer 2025.

The plan’s “North Star,” Ratzkin said, is to “lead an inclusive and resilient creative economy that empowers artists, cultural workers and entrepreneurs to drive culture, creativity and innovation.”

She said the plan treats the creative economy as an ecosystem — the people who create, the institutions that support them, and the places where culture is produced and experienced. She also highlighted five “future forces” shaping that ecosystem: mental health and belonging; access to capital and risk taking; technology and tradition; climate impacts; and affordability and livability.

Ratzkin summarized six overarching goals the plan organizes its strategies around: preparing and supporting the workforce; stabilizing and growing creative economy businesses; increasing statewide revenue through cultural identity and tourism; leveraging state opportunities for local cultural and creative development; defining and tracking ROI — which she said includes “return on investment,” “return on imagination,” and “return on innovation”; and developing capacity and infrastructure at both the state and local levels.

As she connected the framework to San Bernardino County, Ratzkin pointed to recent funding that flowed into the region through state programs administered locally.

“Arts Connection was one of the creative core administering organizations,” she said, adding that through that program “they were able to… put in over $4 million in the creative sector here between 2022 and 2024.”

She said the town hall series is part of phase two — an engagement push meant to capture what communities say is missing and what they need to implement the plan. Phase three, she said, is expected to focus on implementation and evaluation, aligned with the state’s fiscal calendar.

The statewide effort arrives with an explicit economic framing from state officials: the California Arts Council has said the plan is designed to strengthen California’s $288 billion creative sectors and support more than 820,000 creative workers statewide.

For local institutions, speakers said that statewide framing matches what they see when arts funding reaches the Inland Empire.

Manny Saucedo, director of development and strategic relations at KVCR, said his station has already seen what targeted investment can do for local hiring and local storytelling.

“A couple years ago, we actually got some funding from the Arts Council… And through that work, we were able to hire a number of different artists and creatives,” Saucedo said. He pointed to a recent example of local talent rising through that support: “We ended up hiring a TV producer who won an Emmy Award for The Warehouse Empire.”

Saucedo said investment matters not only for cultural output, but for whether creative workers can build stable lives in the Inland Empire.

Saucedo said the investment helps diversify the region’s economy and create local jobs for creative workers. “It’s kind of a spur of the economy, but also to give a different economy or region of folks that can find some work and really stay here locally,” he said. “Instead of them going to LA or San Francisco, they can stay here locally and make a living.”

That retention argument was echoed in the education sector, where county leaders described arts programming as both student development and workforce preparation.

Norm Nunez, community relations manager for the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, said County Superintendent Ted Alejandre “is very, very supportive of the arts programs,” describing arts education as something that develops students “from pre-K through high school” and helps prepare them for college.

Nunez described countywide arts pathways including Poetry Out Loud, visual arts competitions, and honor band and honor orchestra programs that draw students from districts across the county. He said those ensembles span elementary through high school and culminate in an annual performance at the University of Redlands.

Nunez said the county’s size makes arts investment a regional concern. “Being the largest county, San Bernardino County, we want to have that involvement and be at the table and look at what’s the vision for the next generations,” he said, adding that the county serves about 400,000 students across 33 school districts.

He also addressed a recurring public criticism — the idea that arts investment competes with more urgent needs — describing arts participation as essential support for students.

“The emotional support that it gives students, the freedom that it gives them to think and use their imagination… mental health is important to our students,” Nunez said. “So I think there’s a place and on an equal balance with the other things that they’re doing. No difference than somebody playing sports.”

Terry Ball, senior programs manager for California for the Arts, said California’s arts funding is often treated as optional — even as the state brands itself as a creative powerhouse — and she argued that mindset keeps the arts from being recognized as both an economic driver and a practical tool for addressing other challenges.

Ball said she wants the arts to stop being viewed as “something peripheral” and instead be treated like other workforce and economic development priorities. “We hope that the arts are seen as a solution because the arts can help with a lot of the other problems,” she said, citing social issues, criminal justice challenges and health problems.

Ball said California’s funding for the California Arts Council is about $24 million — “ridiculous” for a state its size — and she argued that the state still isn’t investing even “a dollar” per resident. She said California’s arts funding ranks behind a long list of states, including Florida. “As a state, we rank below Alabama and Florida and Texas and a very large number of states in our arts funding,” she said.

Ball cited what she described as a California study on the economic ripple effects of performing arts employment. “For every hundred dollars invested in arts workers in a community, it pays out at least $115,” she said.

Recent national data illustrates the gap Ball described. In the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies’ FY2025 table of per-capita legislative appropriations, California is listed at $0.82 per person, compared with $1.31 in Florida. The highest per-capita figure is Hawai‘i at $11.10, and Minnesota is listed at $10.07.

For Gutierrez Chavez, the case for San Bernardino County was both personal and structural: a region with deep creative roots that needs sustained investment to make creative careers livable.

“It makes me really excited that we’re here today… having a conversation around how can we together, cross sector partners, come together to support the creative economy, our artists, our culture bearers,” he said. “This shared space is the first step that I truly believe can serve as a catalyst for collective work.”