HomeMy WebLinkAbout1/23/2025 Item Funding Priorities, Luckett
Richard Luckett <
Subject:Downtown Vitality and Economic Development
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Jan. 23, 2025
Honorable City Council,
We noted in your agenda for tonight’s community forum, under the heading of “Downtown
Vitality and Economic Development,” there is no mention of the arts or the Cultural Arts
District.
We write to urge you to retain a focus in your 2025-27 Major City Goals on downtown SLO’s
economic and cultural vitality, and to include “the arts” and “cultural vitality” as ingredients
essential to a vibrant community.
We are not asking you to commit any more spending in the near term, but we are urging you
to keep the arts as part of your long-term considerations because a vibrant cultural arts
district, which this City has long been wise to see as essential to the community’s health,
needs constant nurturing.
In this regard, your commitment to the arts over the past few years has been very inspiring to
theater-lovers like us.
We have lived and worked in San Luis Obispo since 1980. We’ve been fortunate to have
accumulated the means to support a number of arts organizations, most especially SLO
Repertory Theatre.
When you voted in June 2024 to increase your commitment to SLO REP’s project to build a
new downtown theatre, you inspired us to increase our commitment by an additional 50
percent. We are proud to be SLO REP’s largest private donor, and we’ve been confident
about the project because of the City’s backing.
We know you understand both the cultural and the economic benefits, so we won’t repeat
those here. But we do want to point out that when this brilliant theater opens, it will be
because of this Council’s long-term tangible support of a long-held vision that a Cultural Arts
District has worth to the city we all love far beyond the dollars invested to create a thriving
arts district.
And we hope this Council, and future Councils, will see the wisdom in continuing to find ways
to bolster the arts and our community’s cultural vitality.
Thank you for your consideration,
Catherine & Richard Luckett
San Luis Obispo
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