Current.org, which follows public broadcasting nationwide, checks in today with a piece surveying the Star Tribune's "war" on Minnesota Public Radio's Legacy Amendment funding.

Reporter Karen Everhart, who was in town last year for Bill Kling's "Future of News" conference, recaps the two key disputes. First, that MPR is getting arts/history sales tax money for programs that don't fit those purposes. And second, MPR's place on a Legacy Fund legislative advisory panel that Star Tribune editorialists criticized as a conflict of interest.

In a Jan. 11 piece, Strib reporter Mike Kaszuba described the panel as "crafting guidelines for who will share in more than $1 billion from the Legacy Amendment sales tax." Kaszuba noted the panel was only advisory, and legislators have the ultimate power. However, he observed, "the unique arrangement on the arts panel is in direct contrast to the panel that recommends Legacy money for outdoors groups." 

Everhart offers chief MPR lobbyist Jeff Nelson' dissent:

“This all comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the panel,” MPR’s Nelson said. “It was not intended to make funding recommendations .... The committee was put together to make sure the organizations that had already been funded were investing the money wisely, in a strategic way.”

“The notion that this is a conflict of interest is kind of ludicrous,” Nelson said. Legislators were “holding our feet to the fire by asking us to create a plan to optimize the impact of this funding.”

Thankfully, the Jan. 15 report is out and available. The recommendations — crafted after six statewide listening sessions and a feedback-gathering website — are largely reasonable, even obvious, yet they would have so much more credibility had they come from less-interested parties.

For example, the 13-member group all come from nonprofits. Not surprisingly, they recommend that Legacy monies be restricted to groups like themselves: "[F]unding is intended for non-profit organizations for work that is open to the public and conducted for the benefit of Minnesotans. It is not intended to fund for-profit enterprises."

This isn't beyond the pale; foundations regularly restrict grants to nonprofits precisely because individual profit is limited. (Even if Bill Kling makes more than the Strib's publisher.) However, MPR's Legacy-funded news syndication service, Minnesota Today, will benefit for-profit newspapers around the state. Why should for-profits be beneficiaries but not grant recipients? The Strib has loudly disdained such a role, but if the panel had included a wider variety of Minnesotans, this limitation might be more credible.

According to the report, the Legacy money should "fund investments will support arts, history and cultural heritage organizations that are already a vital economic engine for the state and new activities that will enhance that economic impact." New activities, but only organizations that are "already a vital economic engine?" Not new organizations, too?

The report does argue that "a sustained ecosystem of individuals and organizations engaged in arts, history and cultural heritage across the state will give Minnesota a distinct advantage over other states as a wonderful place to live, learn, run a business and raise a family." However, there's nothing about what this ecosystem should look like. Should legislators counterbalance the influence of organizations wealthy enough to hire lobbyists, or rich enough to have donor bases that could more easily support programs without Legacy dough? 

Interestingly, the seven-page report scrupulously limits itself to the constitutionally required promotion of "arts, history and cultural heritage." Yet it doesn't speak to one of the central concerns about some MPR projects: that individual awards have an arts or history component, but primarily benefit a non-Legacy purpose, such as general news.

Perhaps all of these recommendations would've been made by a truly independent panel; we'll never know. And of course, it's up to legislators to filter perceived biases, if they are willing to pay close attention in this deficit-wracked year. If nothing else, though, the dispute has brought appropriate scrutiny to one small corner of the state budget. We'll have to wait until 2011 to see how much these recommendations, and this controversy, affect who gets what.