Board members for the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts grappled Monday with a bleak financial crisis as the organization’s CEO acknowledged that this year’s Artscape had fallen far short of economic projections, likely due to stormy weather and cancelled performances.

The board met both in public and in private Monday morning to discuss immediate measures for resolving an emergency that has left the organization strapped for cash just three months into its new fiscal year.

“The past few weeks have been a really trying time for BOPA, and especially for the staff,” interim board chairman Andrew Chaveas said at the beginning of the meeting.

When the organization’s 11-member interim board was fashioned six months ago, Chaveas said, “we joined with fresh and critical eyes. None of us were naive to the troubles this organization was facing. … Our goal today is to make some really difficult financial decisions in light of cash flow decisions we face.”

BOPA is a quasi-governmental agency charged with mounting such public city celebrations as Artscape, New Year’s Eve fireworks, farmers markets and the Baltimore Book Festival.

Earlier this month, the organization announced that it has been running annual deficits since at least the 2018-19 fiscal year — a situation that its new leaders said they discovered only recently.

The organization requested $1.8 million in emergency funds from the city — funds that the city is refusing to provide pending the results of a forensic, or extra-detailed, financial audit.

Even as board members scrutinized three years of financial data, they seemed frustrated Monday at the amount of financial information they still didn’t have.

Board member Angela Wells-Sims said that BOPA’s finances took a severe nosedive in 2019 for reasons that remain unclear.

One factor was Light City Baltimore, the 10-day festival of illuminated visual art and ideas that ran in November 2019 in the Inner Harbor. The festival suffered heavy losses, according to board members, though they not provide a specific dollar amount.

In subsequent years, bad weather also was a factor. For two years in a row, fierce storms forced either the full or partial cancellation of Artscape, the city’s marquee annual public event, holding attendance to 40,000 in 2023 and to 50,000 — according to what CEO Rachel D. Graham described as one preliminary and possibly flawed estimate — in 2024.

This year, Graham said, Artscape had an estimated economic impact of $9 million, or less than a third of the approximately $28 million generated by the festival before the COVID-19 pandemic.

After meeting in closed session, Chaveas said that the BOPA board had decided to remain in its current office space at 7 St. Paul Place, where rent is $16,000 a month, but would explore a subleasing arrangement, perhaps as a shared work space, to generate additional revenue.

The organization had been considering transitioning to remote working to save money. But board member Derrick Chase said the members’ consensus was that it would be difficult to get out of their multiyear rental contract.

The board also has not yet decided if layoffs will be necessary, Graham said.

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