Case Studies: Cultural Planning
by Arthur Greenberg

Lackawanna County Vision for Arts and Culture
Lackawanna County, whose county seat is the City of Scranton, formed an Office of Education and Culture in 2004 and instituted an Education and Culture fee (property tax providing some $1.2 million annually) to provide financial support for some of the County’s arts and cultural assets. The implementation of the education and culture fee has made Lackawanna County the first in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to provide public funding for culture, education, and the arts. As one of its next projects, the Office on Education and Culture elected to pursue a planning process to create a Vision for the Future of Arts and Culture based on an assessment of community needs and beliefs with respect to arts, culture, and heritage. After a national search, AMS Planning & Research was selected to oversee the process with the involvement of a volunteer Steering Committee representing a cross-section of community leadership.

Research for the planning process consisted of interviews with community leaders, a market analysis (involving demographic and lifestyle profiles), surveys of arts, cultural and heritage organizations, a public intercept survey of nearly 250 residents, a series of public forums and Town Meetings held throughout the County, and planning workshops with the Steering Committee. The Plan focuses on methods to develop new audiences and participants for the County’s cultural institutions, to pursue cross-marketing between arts/cultural groups and the County’s library system, to create a downtown cultural district in Scranton, to better support individual artists, and to leverage the region’s higher education resources.

Lee’s Summit Cultural Arts Plan
The City of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, is a rapidly growing suburb in the Kansas City metropolitan area, with a population of nearly 90,000 residents. In 2004 the Mayor and City Council established a strategic goal to conduct a feasibility study for a cultural arts facility. A Cultural Arts Citizens’ Task Force was created to pursue this goal, but recommended in the fall of 2005 that the City should commission a Cultural Arts Plan prior to proceeding with a study for a specific arts building. AMS Planning & Research was selected to oversee a 9-month planning process.

In conducting research for the Cultural Arts Plan we learned of an anecdote from the turn of the last century that served as a guiding framework for the Plan: in the early part of the 20th century, a group of Lee’s Summit citizens, who were mostly farmers, took up a collection of funds to purchase musical instruments for students in the public schools so that they could participate in the arts. In 2007, nearly 100 years later, community leaders and stakeholders have again contributed time and efforts with the support of professional city staff and an officially-empowered Citizens’ Task Force, to chart a course for the future support of arts and culture in the community.

All in all, almost 500 people provided input for the Cultural Arts Plan, including those who completed surveys, participated in interviews, and/or attended meetings. Through a series of planning workshops, the citizens’ Cultural Arts Task Force decided to organize the Plan according to three overall themes: 1) Participation, 2) Education, and 3) Place. Specific recommendations are offered under each organizing theme. A subsequent section addresses infrastructure, providing the staff and financial resources plan that will be required to implement the Plan’s proposals.

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