More than half of BOPA's interim board members resign

One week after public officials voted to terminate the city's contract with the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), at least seven members of BOPA's 13-member interim board of directors have resigned, including interim chair Andrew Chaveas.

The resignations are a sign that the arts advocates who stepped down are no longer willing to devote their time and expertise to the independent agency, after city officials decided to cut ties with it. Their action calls into question whether the organization can continue after losing more than half of the governing body, including its chair and vice chair.

Baltimore's Board of Estimates voted 5 to 0 on Nov. 6 to terminate the city's contract with BOPA, effective January 20. The action means the organization no longer has the city's support to serve as Baltimore's events producer, film office and arts council after that date, or to provide staff support for the city's Public Art Commission. BOPA is still contractually obligated to put on the New Year's Eve fireworks show at the Inner Harbor and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in mid-January.

The request to terminate BOPA's contract came from Mayor Brandon Scott. Two BOPA representatives testified at the Nov. 6 Board of Estimates meeting, asking the five panel members to delay terminating the contract. The Board of Estimates voted to end the relationship after Calvin Young III, senior advisor to Scott, said the mayor's decision was "compelled by concerns regarding BOPA's financial performance and subsequent ability to support the arts community on behalf of the city of Baltimore."

Over time, "it has been evident that BOPA's handling of city-allocated funds has not met the standards of transparency and accountability required for this critical role," Young said.

All of the resignations were submitted since the Nov. 6 Board of Estimates meeting. One of the first was from interim chair Andrew Chaveas, who resigned Nov. 7, effective Nov. 14. A senior project manager with Brailsford & Dunlavey, Inc., he is one of the longest-serving members of the board to resign , having joined the agency more than a year ago. He joined BOPA's board while Donna Drew Sawyer was CEO, after helping the agency move into new offices at 7 St. Paul Street, and took over as interim chair after former chair Brian Davis Lyle's term expired.

Other resignations this month came from interim vice chair Lady Brion, Executive Director of Baltimore's Black Arts District and a member of the city's Public Art Commission; Jeffrey Kent, a visual artist who heads Jeffrey Kent Studio and is Curator-in-Residence at The Peale; Adam Holofcener, Executive Director of Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts; Ellen Janes, Executive Director of the Central Baltimore Partnership; Lu Zhang, Executive Director of A Blade of Grass and former deputy director of The Contemporary museum in Baltimore; and Sarah Scott, a lawyer with Venable LLP.

There was not one mass resignation. The resignations were submitted individually over the past week and sent by email to Chaveas and BOPA CEO Rachel Graham. Word has gotten out because some of the members who resigned have copied each other in their emails.

Others on the interim board are: Derrick Chase, Founder and CEO of Stand Up Baltimore; Andy Cook, Executive Director of Made In Baltimore, a division of the Baltimore Development Corp.; April Lewis, Director of Community + Culture at Open Works; Tonya Miller Hall, Senior Advisor of Arts and Culture in the Mayor's Office; Robyn Murphy, CEO of JRM Consultancy, and interim board treasurer Angela Wells-Sims, a principal with Durant Bailey Group LLC. Wells-Sims is one of the two BOPA representatives who asked the Board of Estimates on Nov. 6 to postpone terminating the contract, along with Graham.

"Very different' organization

One interim board member who resigned, who asked not to be named, said the resignation was a direct response to the Board of Estimates' decision to terminate the city's contract with BOPA. The member said it seemed that BOPA would be turning into a different organization if it was losing both the city's support and its major source of funding.

"They took away the arts council, so what else is there?" the former board member said. Graham "has to raise private money. I just don't see that happening, and I don't think anybody wants to be a part" of a major new fundraising effort.

"The idea was that you would help recreate BOPA – that's what the interim board was supposed to – and figure out how it could be both more effective and sustainable," the board member continued. "Both of those things went away with the Mayor's decision to move the arts council away and terminate funding, because those two things — the arts council designation and the city's financial support — were always considered essential [to keeping BOPA in operation.] Those were critical elements. I would think that most people realized it's a whole different organization now and is it viable? My feeling was you'd be creating something that was very different than trying to revitalize BOPA."

BOPA board positions are unpaid, and all of the interim board members besides Chaveas and Kent officially joined BOPA's board at its quarterly meeting on March 27. None is on BOPA's staff.

BOPA's board is called an interim board because the Board of Estimates in June approved a one-year contract with the agency, starting July 1, 2024, as part of the city's budget deliberations for fiscal 2025. The idea was that BOPA's board would operate on an interim basis for one year and then transition to a permanent board if city officials chose to work with BOPA beyond fiscal 2025.

'Last piece of the puzzle'

Chaveas told the City Council's Ways and Means Committee in March that reconstituting the board with new members was "the last piece of BOPA's puzzle" for regaining trust with city leaders and addressing concerns about its governance after a rocky period with Sawyer, who resigned at Scott's request in 2023. At that point she had failed to produce key events that BOPA was charged with producing for the city for three years in a row, including Artscape and the Baltimore Book Festival. The final straw was her announcement that she would not be producing the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in 2023 and suggestion that citizens take part in a "day of service" instead.

BOPA's board also had a raft of board resignations when Sawyer was CEO, including departures by Heidi Daniel, former President and CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library and board treasurer Jack Lewin, but they did not all come at the same time the way the latest resignations have. Developer Michael Shecter also left the board after Sawyer resigned.

Graham, who became BOPA's CEO in March, did not respond immediately to a request for comment about the resignations, sent to her communications managerWhen she first became CEO, Graham declined to give her contact information to a reporter, saying reporters must go through her media relations representatives to set up an interview. It was the same policy followed by Sawyer. It would not be allowed for heads of city agencies, but BOPA is not part of city government and has different rules.

Asked a second time at a public meeting for her contact information to be used only in case of emergencies, Graham again instructed a reporter to go through her media relations personnel, and not to try to contact her directly. Chaveas, whose office is in Washington, D.C., also declined to provide his contact information, saying to go through BOPA's media relations representatives. Barbara Hauck, BOPA's communications manager, said Wednesday afternoon that she needed more information in order to coordinate an interview with Graham.

Transitional period

Graham said on a radio program last month that she believes there is a need for BOPA to continue its work as an independent advocate for Baltimore's arts community, even if it doesn't have a contract with the city. She said she strongly believes BOPA should continue to serve as the city's Arts Council , a role that enables it to distribute grants to local artists. Her office recently put out a call for artists who want to be considered for the 2025 Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize competition, which in recent years has carried a top award of $30,000. The Sondheim family has an agreement with BOPA to help organize the competition, apart from its soon-to-end role as the city's Arts Council.

Before the recent resignations, BOPA's interim board considered but decided against moving to smaller offices to save money. On one wall of BOPA's headquarters is a large mural with the word "CREATE," a remnant from a time when Sawyer wanted to rename the agency Create Baltimore. Instead of relocating, the board members suggested that one way the organization might earn some revenue to stay open at its current address is to sublease part of BOPA's office space to other tenants. So far no other tenants have moved in.

City officials say the Mayor's Office and other municipal departments will continue to support Baltimore's art community and that they're working on a transition plan that will help determine who BOPA's work will be carried out after Jan. 20. Young told the Board of Estimates that the Mayor's Office will collaborate with the Baltimore Civic Fund to distribute $500,000 in artist relief funding to individual artists.

In a briefing with reporters following the Board of Estimates meeting on Nov. 6, Scott affirmed his support for Baltimore's artists and arts community. He also said he wished that BOPA's leaders had warned him sooner that they were having financial problems and needed funding assistance to continue operating. The city has budgeted approximately $2.6 million a year to support BOPA's activities but since Sawyer's departure has dispersed the money in installments throughout the year, not all at once, so its expenditures can be monitored more closely.

"My job is to make sure that the money, taxpayer money, that Baltimoreans can trust is spent in an appropriate way," the mayor said. "It's unfortunate, some of the things that were said today [at the Board of Estimates meeting], but let me be very clear. The city does not owe them money. We operate under the contract, in an orderly manner, and we continue to do that...The things that were mentioned today could have been mentioned to me, personally. It would be different if folks didn't sit and meet with me and talk with me and never say that they were having financial problems, right? The residents of Baltimore deserve better and we look forward, as we just met with their team on Monday (Nov. 4), how we can transition to look at how all the things with the arts community are going to happen, including what happens with BOPA moving forward."

The transitional period between now and Jan. 20 is the time that the Mayor's Office will decide how BOPA will be replaced as the city's events producer, film office and arts council, and make other arts-related decisions, Scott said.

"This is all part of the transition," he said. "All of that will be worked out as we go through the transition."