Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Sami Abu Shumays, Deputy Director of Flushing Town Hall
4:53:51
ยท
3 min
Sami Abu Shumays, Deputy Director of Flushing Town Hall, testified about the severe budget cuts facing cultural institutions in New York City, particularly Flushing Town Hall. He emphasized the need for increased baseline funding for both Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) and Cultural Development Fund (CDF) organizations.
- Flushing Town Hall faces a 53% cut in operating support, potentially leading to layoffs of up to 40% of their full-time staff.
- The Cultural Equity Coalition of New York advocates for baseline operating support for CDF organizations to address funding delays and instability.
- Shumays highlighted that Flushing Town Hall's funding has remained stagnant for 18 years, despite serving one of the most diverse communities in NYC.
Sami Abu Shumays
4:53:51
Hello.
4:53:53
I just wanna start by thanking you for always, Chair Rivera, being really strong on the details and really questioning the administration throughout your entire time as chair for the last year and a half.
4:54:04
It's been really great to see.
4:54:06
I'm Sami Abuchemez and I'm deputy director at Flushing Town Hall, one of the small SIGs and also a steering committee member of the Latinx Consortium of New York, and the Cultural Equity Coalition of New York.
4:54:19
Flushingtown Hall serves Queens and all of New York City with extraordinarily extraordinarily diverse culturally relevant programs, the exact sort of thing this administration wants to cut, including music, dance, visual arts, and theater programs, arts education programs, and regrants and professional development programs for artists in Queens.
4:54:38
In the 2026 preliminary budget, our operating support allocation drops from $803,000 to $375,000 which is a cut of $428,000 or 53% of our operating support.
4:54:54
That's 12% of our total budget of 3,700,000.0 and could necessitate us having to lay off up to seven or eight of our full time employees, which is greater than 40% of our only 19 full time employees.
4:55:08
Like our other colleagues in the Cultural Institutions group, we use city funds to pay the salaries of full time employees.
4:55:16
So all the cultural institutions are in difficult financial positions, CIG and the CDF especially.
4:55:25
Are, I don't need to tell you what you already have spoken about earlier today, but I'll just say that as a steering committee member of the Cultural Equity Coalition of New York, we see the need from the sector expressed in the CDF impact surveys conducted by Dance NYC and ART New York over the last three years, and we're advocating for baseline operating support for the CDF organizations.
4:55:46
You don't have to make new SIGs to give baseline operating support to freeze everyone at the same level, which would also solve all of the the delay processes that you were just talking about an hour ago.
4:55:59
I'll just add one more thing about Flushing Town Hall, or or two brief things.
4:56:05
One is that our operating support seems to have grown from 350,000 in fiscal eleven to the current 800,000, but we were at 770,000 in fiscal two thousand seven.
4:56:17
So essentially, we're stagnant for the last eighteen years.
4:56:20
We dipped and then we came back up.
4:56:23
And the last thing I'll say about us specifically is that it's great that the city is considering adding new SIGs.
4:56:30
Three million for five institutions might be $600,000 each.
4:56:35
Our baseline still isn't $600,000.
4:56:39
Our baseline is still 375,000, and we've been in the CIG for thirty years, serving one of the most diverse communities in New York City.
4:56:48
So, we hope that you add more CIGs, but we hope that you baseline all the existing organizations CIGs and CDF organizations.
4:56:58
75,000,000.