Culture faces a new issue: consolidation

Cultural institutions in our country receive less pleasant news from authorities on a regular basis. The Minister of Culture, Raluca Turcan, has announced that the deadline for the consolidation of certain cultural institutions is January 1, 2025: "We have secured the deadline of January 1, 2025 because, from the perspective of cultural institutions, it would seem like a crime to impose a one-size-fits-all approach on the Culture domain by local authorities. I am now only talking about the field of cultural institutions. We need to carry out these consolidations by January 1, 2025. (...) If we were to ask what savings can be achieved with these consolidations, the answer is 'quite modest savings.' My concern is that if we end up consolidating in the cultural field, they should bring cultural institutions closer to the public and increase access to culture." Turcan argued that given that there are cultural institutions under the Ministry of Culture and hundreds more under local authorities, "whoever imagines that you can consolidate in such a way as to not disrupt and dismantle national culture by January 1, 2024, is daydreaming." "Let it be very clear. Who can imagine that hundreds of libraries or theaters can be rearranged within the Romanian cultural system to be closer to the people in three months?" Turcan asked, mentioning that the consolidation proposals come from officials, from technical teams that "do not understand all the specificities of certain institutions," such as the existence of cultural institutions resulting from donations or parliamentary normative acts, or those with a unique character in an ethnic context. "These are the specificities that I am duty-bound to protect," the government official stated. The Minister of Culture also announced that she had succeeded, in discussions with the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, in eliminating the reference to the funding of cultural institutions under local authorities, which was initially limited to a percentage based on their own revenues: "Regarding the subject of consolidating cultural institutions, if there are fewer than 50 employees, we have managed to introduce an exception. Cultural institutions established by laws of Parliament or operating based on donations or supporting national identity should be exempt from consolidation, and if there are situations where intervention is needed, we can do so through a memorandum. These are the most significant concerns, and there was also concern about the fate of the Cultural Directorates, which you have discussed in the public sphere, and here we have succeeded, and I hope it will remain in the final project, to regionalize the County Cultural Directorates on the model of fiscal directorates so that they do not come under local authorities and can fulfill their primary role as project investment advisors." Raluca Turcan assured that, following discussions with representatives of the Ministry of Finance, the VAT rate on books, tickets for shows, and concerts will not increase.