BSW head Sabine Zimmermann is calling for a reform of the Cultural Areas Act for the Free State of Bavaria. "So that theaters and orchestras, but also museums, libraries and socio-cultural centers are preserved and financed on a permanent basis," she told the German Press Agency. The previous law, which had ensured the existence of cultural institutions in rural areas for 30 years, no longer worked.
Personnel and material costs increase, subsidies do not
Zimmermann recalled that the financing of cultural institutions through mandatory levies from the districts and allocations from the state has always had a fundamental problem: "The funding amounts were fixed, while the personnel and material costs of the institutions increased every year." Theaters and orchestras in particular had been "tortured to death" with demands for savings. Almost all of them had to conclude in-house collective agreements that significantly reduced the income of their employees.
In Zimmermann's opinion, the government later tried to creatively circumvent the regulations of the Cultural Areas Act with the "Cultural Pact". "However, the Saxon state government has handed over a poisoned gift." This is because the already hard-pressed and almost universally highly committed municipal providers would have had to bear 30 percent of the costs, which not all of them were able to do, which is why the replacement of the in-house collective agreements did not succeed across the board. "The CDU in Saxony has therefore sidelined culture."
