When the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts lost its contract with the city of Baltimore that provided more than half of its annual funding, some observers interpreted that as a death knell for the event-planning organization.

But BOPA isn’t giving up.

That was the message that board members of the quasi-governmental agency hoped to convey to nearly 150 artists and arts organizers who attended an online town hall-style question-and-answer session Tuesday night.

Board members said they hope to continue to serve Baltimore’s creative community, even if they’re not entirely certain what form that service will take.

“No matter what life looks like after we deal with our contract with the city of Baltimore, we are an arts advocacy organization,” CEO Rachel D. Graham told attendees at the online meeting. “That responsibility still remains.”

City officials sent a letter to Graham and board chairman Andrew Chaveas on Oct. 16 announcing plans to sever their 22-year relationship with BOPA as of Jan. 20. The letter cited years of financial mismanagement culminating in the organization’s Sept. 19 announcement that it had run out of money less than three months into the new fiscal year.

Graham and Chaveas, who are new in their roles, also revealed that BOPA had essentially run deficits for at least the past five fiscal years.

But Graham said Tuesday that a large part of BOPA’s problem was caused by cash flow. Nearly all of the most expensive and high-profile events that the agency was charged with mounting were crammed into the second half of the calendar year, she said. But since BOPA’s $2.7 million city allocation has been disbursed quarterly for the past two fiscal years, the agency frequently ran short toward the end of summer.

Board members acknowledged, however, that cash flow was merely one of the financial hurdles BOPA was unable to surmount.

“To be clear, what BOPA currently faces is not the result of irresponsibility or mismanagement,” Graham said.

“It is the result of a cataclysmic mixture of the COVID cliff, years of perceived instability which have cooled interest from funders and quite honestly an unsustainable business model that has been documented as placing pressures on this organization for years.”

About half of the attendees at Tuesday’s session identified themselves as artists, according to forms they filled out before the event, and many of them rely on BOPA for funding.

The remainder included administrators for some of the largest cultural organizations in town, from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, represented by Senior Vice President Allison Burr-Livingstone, to The Lyric Baltimore’s Executive Director Jonathan Schwartz, who attended the meeting out of concern for maintaining Baltimore’s cultural ecosystem.

Participants peppered Graham and board members Chaveas, “Lady” Brion Gill and April Lewis with questions about everything from the fate of the farmers markets (BOPA will continue to operate the popular open-air markets through December) to whether anything could be done to persuade the city not to terminate its contract (probably not).

Chaveas listed some of BOPA’s traditional responsibilities that will be absorbed by the city in the future: managing event spaces such as the Bromo Seltzer Tower and the Cloisters Castle, operating the farmers markets, and mounting Artscape and other major city festivals.

But the question that appeared to interest meeting participants the most was whether BOPA would retain its designation as the city’s arts council — in effect a kind of middleman that administers a pot of money set aside for local artists and arts groups by state, federal and local governments. The arts council selects the artists and groups that will receive grants, determines how much those grants will be, and disburses the funds.

At the moment, board treasurer Angela Wells-Sims said, BOPA remains the city’s official arts council. While another agency could apply to take on that responsibility, the application process is cumbersome and so time-consuming that a switch-over could risk delaying grants to cash-strapped artists.

Wells-Sims said that hanging on to that role is instrumental for BOPA’s future.

“It is vital to us to maintain our arts council designation,” she said.

But Graham said that BOPA will continue to work on behalf of the city’s musicians, sculptors and poets “with or without” the arts council status.

This is an opportunity, she said, for BOPA to think about other ways it can support Baltimore’s cultural community. Perhaps it can mount a series of small, community-based festivals. Perhaps it can identify corporations willing to fund new artist prizes or grants.

“There is still work that can be done,” Graham said.

“Just because our contract with the city was terminated does not mean our relationship ends. There are absolutely spaces for us to continue to work together, and that is what I am committed to doing.”

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com, 1410332-6704 and x.com/@mcmccauley.