On November 3, Philly voters will decide the fate of our city’s office of arts and culture

It’ll be Question 2 on your ballot, and it asks, “Shall the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to establish and define the functions of Creative Philadelphia, an office headed by the Chief Cultural Officer to promote the City’s arts, culture, and creative economy sector?”

To find out more, I spoke with Philly’s chief cultural officer Val Gay, the head of Creative Philadelphia, the City’s office of arts and culture. (The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, of which BSR is a 2026 grantee, falls under this office.)

At the whim of the mayor

Currently, Creative Philadelphia “exists through an executive order, which means arts and culture have lived on the whims of the mayor at the time,” Gay explained. A WHYY story has some background on the office’s varied fortunes. It was founded in 1986 under Mayor Wilson Goode. Mayor John Street closed the office, Mayor Michael Nutter reopened it with a new name, and Mayor Jim Kenney proposed eliminating it entirely in 2020. The arts community rallied and saved it, but funding the office is still a perennial fight.

“This is not a time to be quiet,” Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (GPCA) president and CEO Patricia Wilson Aden told me in 2025 about the battle for the city’s 2026 arts budget.

“It was a moral obligation for us to try to become permanent instead of starting over from scratch with every mayor,” Gay told me last week about the campaign to get this question on the ballot.

“When the office is created by executive order, any other mayor can reverse that and the office disappears,” At-Large Councilmember Rue Landau, who has been a champion of the legislation behind the measure, said in an interview. In her office’s 2025 report on our arts sector, which surveyed more than 360 working artists in Philadelphia, one of the top concerns was a “need for stronger institutional support,” including municipal support for the arts. Currently, according to GPCA, Philly lags far behind other cities in per capita arts funding.

That matters, especially when Southeastern PA’s cultural sector has an annual impact of $3.3 billion, and according to Landau’s office, represents 130,000 jobs in Philly.

A long road to the voters

It was a long road to get the question on the ballot, Gay said. In June 2025, Mayor Cherelle Parker announced that she wanted to make Creative Philadelphia a permanent office, which surprised Gay, who has been focused on the city’s first-ever cultural master plan, a major multi-year project. “I thought I was going to have to lobby for it,” Gay said of kicking off the ballot process.

She worked with the policy department on draft legislation, which was assigned to Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, another arts champion in City Hall, and cosponsored by Landau. After a public hearing in May 2026, the legislative committee voted unanimously to pass it on to the full council, which voted unanimously on June 11 to put it on the mayor’s desk. Finally, the question could go directly to voters. “It was like a snowball that was picking up more people,” Gay said.

Sending a strong message on arts funding

Gay is glad that Philadelphians have a chance to settle this longstanding issue.

“We’re part of civic infrastructure, just like other things,” including water, policing, and firefighting, Gay insisted in regards to the cultural sector. If we’re not willing to fund the arts with public dollars, that is tantamount to saying that “only the folks who are able to pay should have access to arts and culture … If only the rich people can pay for art, what kind of society would we be?”

Landau added that making the arts office permanent will help to inject arts funding into every neighborhood of the city, not just central points like the Avenue of the Arts. “When arts and culture are on the charter, it has a permanent seat on the table … making Philadelphia a better place.”

Landau emphasized that this vote is not just symbolic, and it extends beyond the creation of any one office. Voting yes on Question 2 is a way for Philadelphians to speak directly to our legislators, saying that the arts are important to us, and we demand public support for them. As Landau put it, “it’s permanent, it’s serious, it’s something that we need to fund.”

Make your plan now to vote on Tuesday, November 3. The polls will be open from 7am-8pm (if you’re in line by 8pm, you will be able to vote). Check your voter registration, read up on the candidates, find your polling place, and make your voice heard.

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