From the New York Times 
 
July 25, 2005 
 
Even the City's Cultural Organizations Are Hiring Lobbyists Now 
 
By MIKE McINTIRE 
 
While reducing their hours or raising admission fees in recent years, the city's public libraries and cultural institutions have spent millions on lobbying, part of a growing trend in which nonprofit organizations hire professionals to pursue public subsidies. 
 
With the mayor and other top elected officials represented on many of their boards, these institutions would not seem to need lobbyists to obtain government support. But over the last five years, the amount that these cultural organizations have spent annually to lobby City Hall, the State Legislature and Congress has been steadily increasing, according to public filings. 
 
 The libraries, museums and arts centers argue that increased competition for charitable donations and taxpayer money, particularly in the difficult years after the Sept. 11 attack, have made it necessary to employ lobbyists to work the halls of government, which heavily finances their operations. 
 
But critics say it is bizarre for public organizations that are widely viewed as adjuncts of city government to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby legislators and administrators for money. 
 
 Many of them operate on municipal property and routinely draw public officials to their meetings, and the city has a department to help with the needs of cultural groups. 
 
"It's a pretty sorry state of affairs when our libraries and other public institutions have to hire professional lobbyists to lobby for public support," said Neal Rosenstein, government reform coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group. "It's unfortunate that they believe they are expected to get involved in that process." 
 
The total amount spent on lobbying in the city, including expenditures by big businesses like tobacco and telecommunications firms, reached a record $33.6 million last year, twice what it was five years ago. Some of the increase may be the result of more aggressive tactics by nonprofit groups vying for a shrinking pool of public resources, leading to what some City Council members said was an atmosphere of runaway lobbying during recent negotiations on the city budget. 
 
 At the same time, many cultural organizations enjoy access to City Hall that other nonprofits can only dream of. 
 
The city's Department of Cultural Affairs maintains a special unit to manage its relationship with the 34 nonprofits that make up the Cultural Institutions Group, which includes prominent museums, zoos and arts centers that operate on city-owned property. The unit's staff members "monitor institutions' operations and programs on a periodic basis, provide technical assistance in various areas of non-profit management, and serve as a liaison between the institutions and other city agencies," according to the department's Web site. 
 
Yet for all the city's attentiveness, the institutions group has used a professional lobbyist in recent years to press the city for money, and many individual nonprofits within the group also do their own lobbying. Among the largest expenditures made was by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which has spent $500,000 over the last five years lobbying the city, public filings show. 
 
Typical of the group's smaller members is Queens Theater in the Park, which has paid more than $100,000 since 2002 to the Parkside Group, an influential firm that in addition to lobbying has also advised City Council members and state legislators. 
 
In interviews, several city officials and representatives of cultural groups attributed the increasing use of lobbyists to the annual budget dance that occurs between the Council and mayor's office. In a tradition that dates to the Giuliani era, the Council negotiates to restore a few hundred million dollars to the mayor's proposed budget, and then decides what organizations and agencies to give it to. 
 
Kate D. Levin, the city's cultural affairs commissioner, said that for some organizations, as much as 25 percent of operating revenues hinge on the outcome of City Hall deliberations in the weeks leading to the adoption of a city budget. She said groups are not permitted to use city money to pay for lobbying. 
 
"There has been an impulse among many institutions to lobby the Council, because that's where you can get additional money," said Ms. Levin, adding: "You don't need lobbyists to lobby us. I feel very strongly that you shouldn't have to hire lobbyists to talk to me. You can come see me." 
 
Last year, the Cultural Institutions Group, under a new chairwoman, Lowrey Sims, decided to drop its lobbyist and instead hire a "strategic communications consultant" to help get its message across in City Hall. Asked why the group needed any sort of professional help, she said, "It's really the politics of the budget process that make it necessary. 
 
"Most organizations would prefer not to have a lobbyist, but it is the peculiarity of the budget system that makes it important for many of them to have one," said Ms. Sims, who is executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. "I don't think there isn't anyone among us who wouldn't love to have another way to do this. It puts us in a really difficult position." 
 
Recent events seem to confirm the concerns about politics. Several council members asserted last month that their budget requests on behalf of nonprofit groups were cut in retaliation for their decisions not to support Speaker Gifford Miller in a legislative battle with the mayor. 
 
Even organizations that seem to have all-embracing connections to government decision-makers find the need to pay lobbyists. The Brooklyn Public Library, for instance, was created by an act of the Legislature, and its board of trustees, which includes state judges, a city commissioner and two close aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is appointed by the mayor and the borough president. But despite its obvious government connections, the library spent $275,000 in 2003 on professional lobbyists, according to its federal tax return for that year. 
 
Steven Schechter, the library's governmental affairs director, said the library hires outside lobbyists on the state and federal level, and it pays him to lobby the city. He said that because of the city's budget troubles in recent years, the library must do everything it can to make sure its needs are met. 
 
"The mayor has his priorities when he's establishing the budget," Mr. Schechter said. "While we appreciate that some of our board members have access to the mayor, at the end of the day, there is a limited pool of resources that we are competing for." 
 
The Queens Borough Public Library, which has a board structure similar to Brooklyn's, has spent more than $100,000 over the last five years on outside firms to lobby the city and state. The New York Public Library does not spend as much on city lobbying as its counterparts in the other boroughs ($14,000 in 2004), and when it does, it uses its own executives. In Washington, however, the library has paid the firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld more than $400,000 since 2000 to lobby for federal money, according to public filings. 
 
Roughly half of the New York Public Library's operating budget, which totaled $274 million for the fiscal year that ended in June 2004, comes from government subsidies. Jennifer Bertrand, a spokeswoman for the library, said the relatively small amount spent on lobbying pays important dividends. 
 
"The return that we get from our efforts is city, state and federal support," Ms. Bertrand said, "which is crucial to the library's ability to fulfill its public mission."