Board members for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts grappled Monday with a financial situation that remains bewilderingly vague even as it has thrown the organization into a crisis.
The board met both in public and in private Monday morning to discuss emergency measures that could range from moving out of the organization’s current office space at 7 St. Paul Place, where they’re currently paying $16,000 month rent, to potential layoffs.
“The past few weeks have been a really trying time for BOPA, and especially for the staff,” interim board chairman Andrew Chaveas said at the beginning of the meeting.
When the organization’s 11-member interim board was fashioned six months ago, Chaveas said, “we joined with fresh and critical eyes. None of us were naive to the troubles this organization was facing. … Our goal today is to make some really difficult financial decisions in light of cash flow decisions we face.”
BOPA is a quasi-governmental agency charged with mounting such public city celebrations as Artscape, New Year’s Eve fireworks, farmers markets and the Baltimore Book Festival.
During an emergency meeting Sept. 19, Graham said she and board chairman Andrew Chaveas found out only recently that BOPA has been running annual deficits since at least the 2018-19 fiscal year.
The organization requested $1.8 million in emergency funds from the city — funds that the city is refusing to provide pending the results of a forensic, or extra-detailed, financial audit.
But even as board members scrutinized three years of financial data, they seemed frustrated Monday at the amount of financial information they still didn’t have.
Board member Angela Wells-Sims said that BOPA’s finances took a severe nosedive in 2019 for reasons that remain unclear.
Board member Lu Zhang said that one factor was Light City Baltimore, the 10-day festival of illuminated visual art and ideas that ran in November 2019 in the Inner Harbor. The festival suffered heavy losses, board members said, but did not provide a specific dollar amount.
This story will be updated.