A board member of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts said the troubled organization has become so dysfunctional that the city should find “a new framework for supporting the arts.”

Ellen Janes, executive director for the Central Baltimore Partnership, stopped short of calling for the dissolution of the quasi-governmental agency that provides grants to artists and plans city celebrations. But she said it’s imperative that, at minimum, BOPA should be restructured from bottom to top.

“The situation we’re in is extremely unfortunate,” Janes told The Baltimore Sun. “It also was preventable. I don’t think the way we are operating now is viable, and it apparently hasn’t been viable for a long while.”

Janes made her comments Friday following an emergency board meeting in which agency officials revealed that, less than three months into its fiscal year, it has run out of cash. In response, Mayor Brandon Scott called for a “forensic audit” — or a comprehensive examination of the organization’s books that goes into granular detail about how taxpayer money is being spent.

Until that audit is completed, a spokesman for Scott said, the city will withhold $1.8 million in emergency funds that BOPA had requested to tide it over and pay its bills.

According to a post on social media, some performers at the 2024 Artscape were still waiting for their paychecks nearly a month after the festival closed. The three-day festival was hindered by a storm that forced the cancellation of performances by its two major headliners: Sheila E. and Chaka Khan.

“FYI, It is September 3 and people who performed at Artscape still have not been paid for it,” reads the post by a writer calling himself “Former Squeegee Boy.”

“This is why I throw my own event. Everybody who performed at my after party got paid that night. BOPA by rule and practice does not pay artists on time.”

The BOPA board will meet Wednesday to discuss steps for easing its money woes that could include moving out of the organization’s headquarters at 7 St. Paul Place, where it pays $16,000 a month in rent. In addition, interim board chairman Andrew Chaveas has said the board can’t rule out layoffs.

Since BOPA was founded in 2002 by former Mayor Martin O’Malley, it has had a contract to mount city festivals such as Artscape, the Baltimore Book Festival and New Year’s fireworks.

That contract was renewed in June — but for one year only and with stringent restrictions. Rachel D. Graham, who was appointed as BOPA’s CEO in March, said that negotiations with the city on next year’s contract already have begun.

But Janes said she wonders whether BOPA should get out of the festival-planning business. She suggested that BOPA might concentrate on awarding grants and providing other forms of support to artists, and hand off its festival-planning and fundraising duties to another agency.

“BOPA has to be more of a hub that leverages resources to support the arts,” Janes said. “We have to recognize that is a very different function than putting on festivals. They require people with different skills.”

And yet, for more than 15 years, BOPA juggled both responsibilities with minimal controversy.

Bill Gilmore served as BOPA’s CEO from 2002 until he retired in 2018. He worked closely with Director of Festivals Kathy Hornig, who left BOPA in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every year, Gilmore’s team raised more than $1 million from private donors for Artscape alone.

During Gilmore’s tenure, BOPA made headlines when it became embroiled in an intellectual property dispute over its new visual arts festival, Light City Baltimore. It weathered another spate of negative publicity for uninviting controversial author Rachel Dolezal from the 2017 Baltimore Book Festival.

Still, there were not public tensions between BOPA and various mayoral administrations, or emergency meetings caused by the organization slipping into the red — even after the 2008 financial crisis.

But beginning with the appointment of former CEO Donna Drew Sawyer in 2018, BOPA has been engulfed in near-constant turmoil, from Sawyer’s last-minute decision to call off the 2023 former Martin Luther King Day Parade to the organization’s misguided effort to trademark the BOPA name.

“This staff has been working in crisis for almost three years,” Graham said. “We are trying hard to figure out how to clean up a mess we did not create.”

The COVID-19 pandemic partly masked BOPA’s problem by providing an influx of federal funds that helped pay its bills. And, it partly made those problems worse by rearranging the fundraising landscape.

“The arts funding environment right now is very tight,” Janes said. “A lot of organizations are competing for limited funds. There are many important partners who are ready to step up, but they have lost confidence in BOPA.”

In recent years, BOPA has become accustomed to asking the city to cover its budget shortfalls, including for the 2022 New Year’s Eve fireworks, for the 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade — and again last week.

“There is a weight put on our organization to continually fundraise massive amounts of money year after year after year,” Graham said. “Post-COVID, the model has changed about how corporations decide what to fund.”

That is partly why former CFO Brian Wentz urged BOPA officials to recruit new board members with deep pockets, solid connections and fundraising expertise.

“Historically, the board has not been constituted this way,” Wentz said at BOPA’s Dec. 13, 2023 meeting. “But it’s really important for the future of this organization that we have a board that has the ability and the desire to raise money.”

Wentz, who retired last year, could not be reached for comment.

BOPA also had been under pressure to add practicing artists to its board.

On March 27, the organization’s board expanded from five to 13 members. Though it now includes eight directors who are practicing artists or who run cultural organizations, none are philanthropists with a history of making major gifts.

Chaveas said he doesn’t recall Wentz’s comments.

“I’m sure there are a number of board members who can fundraise,” he said. “But our directive from the city right now is to develop a clear picture of our financial situation and chart a path forward.”