Where Minister Bussemaker with the new 'cash transfers' trying to sell the same overall budget as 'an additional investment of 18 million' and municipalities like Amsterdam the old-fashioned cheese slicer handle to make cuts, the municipality of Enschede is wielding the blunt axe. Despite fierce opposition and 27,000 signatures from concerned citizens, the city council agreed to an additional annual cut of 600,000 on the library and 600,000 on museum Twentse Welle.
Now that is decisiveness and daring to take painful decisions. There is even something to be said for it. Because wouldn't it be better to make clear choices instead of muddling through and distributing the pain indiscriminately? Of course, such decisions must be well argued and based on a vision or the wishes of the inhabitants.
This is what is now lacking in Enschede.
When he was still an entrepreneur, VVD culture alderman Jeroen Hatenboer knew better than anyone what was going on in Enschede. Does the municipality perhaps want a city poet but is the decision-making process about it extremely cumbersome? Does it threaten to get bogged down in endless meetings about procedures and criteria? Then we will find, together with the library, a solution outside politics. After which that politics followed gratefully.
That being substantively responsible yourself as an administrator is something else, especially when you then also have to take budgets and coalition partners into account, is clear. Unfortunately, the usual reflex of elected administrators is all too often: stubbornly falling back on the party ideology and coalition agreements in place at the time.
Exactly that happened in Enschede, exactly how the now alderman of culture Hatenboer acted. The new municipal coalition, which managed to do without the PvdA for the first time in living memory, spoke of 'listening to the people'. No regent culture of politicians who have determined everything in the city for years. New momentum.
But then, when cuts have to be made, that same coalition crawls back into its shell. Local election programmes are immediately traded in for defending policies no matter what, with each responsible councillor then drawing on their own party's national discourse.
Because how did Hatenboer defend the cuts to cultural institutions? By arguing that they needed to be more active in the market. More innovative. More focused on the wishes of the public. But how exactly? No idea, that's up to the institutions themselves. Don't expect a vision from the municipality.
We recognise the pattern and can almost hear Halbe Zijlstra's circular reasoning again: if you attract enough audience/revenue, you need less subsidy. If that is not the case, then apparently there is not enough public interest and it is therefore unjustified to spend taxpayers' money on it. Hence, the councillor signed the 'my library must stay' petition without hesitation. After all, who is against that?
The commotion that followed - even nostyle dived on top of it - was pre-directed, and gave Hatenboer every opportunity to explain everywhere that the college has nothing against the library, but that the library needs to operate differently. Seize opportunities. Come up with a new business plan. Show entrepreneurship. And finally, things that had already led to disasters and quarrels led, but entirely in line with the then secretary of state for culture, now VVD party leader.
The fact is that the municipality of Enschede is wiping out a museum as well as imposing an unsustainable cut of 0.9 million on the library in one decision. Not to make room for other cultural institutions or initiatives, but merely to balance the budget.
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