Maine Music Alliance

The biggest challenge is that the people who make Portland’s culture can’t afford to stay in it. Musicians, painters, poets, sound engineers, bartenders who book the room: these are the same people getting priced out of housing, studio space, and rehearsal space. I’ve watched this happen before. I’m from Oakland, and I’ve seen a city lose its creative class first, then wonder where its character went. Portland doesn’t have to follow that path.

The second challenge is that City Hall treats the arts as an amenity instead of an economy. Venues, artists, and the businesses around them generate real jobs, real tourism, and real tax revenue. The City’s role is to act like it: fund the arts at a level that matches their return, keep a seat at the table for the creative sector, and connect arts policy to housing, permitting, and economic development instead of leaving it on an island.

I’d start by making the case in the budget, not just in speeches. Arts funding should be measured the way we measure any economic investment: jobs supported, visitors drawn, small businesses sustained. When that case is made with numbers, a few dollars per resident stops looking like a luxury and starts looking like one of the best returns the City gets.

Concretely, I’d push for a dedicated, predictable arts line in the budget that grows on a multi-year plan toward the levels of peer cities like Burlington, rather than a one-time bump that disappears the next cycle. I’d also look at dedicating a share of revenue the creative economy already helps generate, such as hospitality and cruise-related revenue, back into the sector that drives it. And I’d ask the Council to treat arts staffing as essential infrastructure, not the first thing cut.

Creative Portland does important work, and I’m not interested in relitigating 2023 for its own sake. The real problem is the gap it left: the City no longer has anyone inside City Hall whose job is the creative sector. That means artists and venues have no one to call when permitting, licensing, or zoning decisions land on them.

I support creating an Office of Arts and Culture inside the City, even if it starts small, that works in partnership with Creative Portland rather than replacing it. Creative Portland can keep its independence for programming and advocacy, and the City office handles policy, permitting navigation, and coordination across departments. I’m open to a nightlife or night economy liaison role within that office, focused on venues, late-night workers, safety, and noise, so the people who run our night economy have a direct line to the City.

I share the goal here. Portland’s independent venues are the backbone of our music ecosystem, and a project that risked letting one company dominate the market deserved real scrutiny. But I don’t support how the city got there. Portland Music Holdings was moving through the normal review process when the Council passed a retroactive moratorium that stopped the project after the fact. When a developer follows the rules the city itself set and then gets blocked anyway, that’s not a position the city can easily defend, and it’s now a federal lawsuit. Win or lose, the legal bills come out of the same budget that should be funding the arts.

A short-term fix that creates a long legal fight isn’t a win for the music community. I’d rather Portland put a standing, public framework in place before the next large venue proposal arrives: clear criteria on traffic, parking, impact on existing independent venues, and local hiring, set in advance and applied the same way to every applicant, not written in response to one project. That’s exactly the kind of decision an Office of Arts and Culture, with a nightlife liaison inside it, should be making through a standing process, not the Council through an emergency vote.

I’d also rather protect independent venues by making them stronger, not just by making it harder for anyone else to open. That means direct investment: grants, low-cost space, and preservation funding of the kind that kept stages across the country alive during the pandemic, so independent venues can compete on their own strength instead of leaning on a buffer that may not survive a courtroom.

First, by listening and following their lead rather than designing programs for them. Portland sits on Wabanaki homeland, and the City should consult Wabanaki artists and cultural leaders directly on public art, land acknowledgment practices, and access to public space, and pay them for that expertise.

Acknowledgment is the right place to start, and I don’t dismiss it. Theaters and institutions across the country are starting to name whose land they stand on, and that kind of awareness matters. But awareness is the beginning of change, not the end of it.

Think about what happens after a car accident. Two drivers pull over, get out, and acknowledge that damage was done. The next step isn’t to drive away feeling good about having stopped. It’s to exchange information, because that information exists for one purpose: repair. Repair is what comes after acknowledgment in every relationship where damage has been done, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because both people agree to make it happen.

That’s the step Portland keeps skipping. We acknowledge the land. We don’t repair what was taken from it, or from the people who still live on it. If we’re honest about what Wabanaki land, culture, and people have contributed to this state’s economic and cultural engine, acknowledgment has to lead somewhere. It has to lead to analysis: looking honestly at how far out of balance things have gotten. And it has to lead to modification: changing the systems, the budgets, and the decisions that kept it that way. Awareness without repair is a courtesy. Repair is the actual work.

For immigrant and New Mainer communities, the barriers are often practical: knowing how to get a permit, find an affordable space, apply for a grant, or book a public venue. An Office of Arts and Culture should make those pathways accessible in multiple languages and actively reach out, not wait for applications. Public festivals, libraries, schools, and parks should regularly feature these traditions, with artists paid fairly. Every voice matters, and that has to include the voices that are newest to the city and the voices that were here first.

Yes. Affordable space is the single most practical thing the City can help with. I’d support using City-owned property, including underused buildings and parcels, for studios, rehearsal rooms, galleries, classrooms, and performance space, through long-term, low-cost leases to nonprofits or artist cooperatives.

I’ve also proposed routing chronically vacant homes, through code-enforcement receivership and tax foreclosure, to local nonprofits that can rehab them into housing for working people, including artists and musicians. Artists need a place to live as much as a place to work.

And yes, I think Portland should pursue a public arts center built on a model like Burlington City Arts: a public-private partnership that offers classes, exhibitions, and studio access and anchors the City’s commitment to the arts in something people can walk into.

A few I’d look at closely: Burlington City Arts, a public-private partnership serving as Burlington’s cultural planner, with classes, exhibitions, and studio programs. New York City’s Office of Nightlife, created in 2018 to work with venues, workers, and neighbors on the night economy. Amsterdam’s night mayor, an independent advocate for nightlife who works directly with the city. And Austin’s Music Commission, a formal city advisory board that gives the music community a seat in policy decisions.

The common thread is giving the creative sector a permanent, official voice in city government, so it isn’t heard only when there’s a crisis.

I’m not coming to this as an outsider. I’m a musician, a spoken word poet, and a painter. I’ve performed, booked, and built community through the arts for most of my life, and I serve on the boards of arts organizations here in Maine. I know what it means to pack up after a show at midnight and wonder whether you can afford rent next month.

I also come to this as a grassroots art organizer, someone who’s spent years pulling venues, promoters, and musicians into the same room and doing it mostly unpaid. Before a single painting sells or a single ticket moves, there are hours nobody sees: the practice, the rehearsal, the glaze that has to cure, the canvas reworked three times before it’s right. Call it practice. Call it skill building. It is still labor, and it still deserves to be paid like labor.

Here’s the injustice that sits with me the most. If a mechanic spends an hour under the hood of my car, I pay for that hour. Every five minutes they’re in there, I’m paying for it, because we agree their time and their skill are worth something. We don’t extend artists that same respect. A painter can put a hundred hours into a piece and sell it for less than minimum wage once you divide it out. A musician can spend a decade building the chops to play one set well and still get handed a tip jar instead of a fee. I’d put artists among the most underpaid workers in this city, and I say that having spent twenty years as a social service worker too. At least service workers clock regular hours and take home tips on top of their wage. Most artists don’t have either.

We absorb the cost of our own labor so the work can exist at all, and the city treats what we make as a nice-to-have instead of what it actually is: the engine. Artists are the creative engine that drives a city’s culture and its economy both, and right now Portland isn’t maintaining that engine. We’re running it on fumes and calling it inspiration.

Imagine a city that valued its art the way it values any other skilled trade. Imagine it understood the engine underneath the hood and made sure that engine ran well: paid fairly, housed, given real space to work, given a seat at the table. That city wouldn’t just survive on its culture. It would run almost indefinitely.

My platform is built on the idea that Portland should be a place people can stay, not just visit. That includes the artists and musicians who make it worth visiting in the first place. When I talk about housing, I mean housing for the people who make our culture. When I talk about investing in workers, families, and small businesses, I mean independent venues and the people who work in them. The arts aren’t a separate issue for me. They’re one of the clearest measures of whether this city is working for the people who give it life.