Smoke 'em if you got 'Em - A patron of the arts lends her support.

Cathy Boyle has been trekking around town looking for a good deal on office space, even though she doesn't have a bank account to write a check from. In fact she's not even sure who her board of directors will be. Boyle is "acting" executive director of Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the county taxing district that will disburse the money collected from all those buying cigarettes. She's acting until the commissioners swear her in.

Boyle studied art history, English and studio art at Ohio University, and took graduate courses at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State, but most of her career has been in politics. The daughter of former Commissioner Mary Boyle, she was until recently executive assistant to Commissioner Tim Hagan, and prior to that ran a political and nonprofit fundraising company. As she talks about heading Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, she refers to the "shareholders." In politico-speak, those are the voters and taxpayers. In this case she speaks with a little more specificity:

"Particularly the smokers," she says.

Her search for office space lingered briefly on the County Archives manse in Ohio City, but it looks like she'll be settling in at the Bulkley Building on Playhouse Square. She thinks she might be moved in by May. That's just before the first installment of the cigarette tax is due to arrive in her soon-to-be-established bank account — a wire transfer anticipated to be around $2 million.

Boyle's county-appointed task will be to build the tool that will give the money away to nonprofit arts organizations and individual artists. If that sounds like she'll be improvising, the truth is that she has ample guidance. The organization and its procedures are described in detail — the legal pieces by state law, the policy matters by a county-appointed committee that has written what it calls "investment models," which amount to funding categories, purposes and criteria. The group that authored those guidelines, the Cuyahoga County Cultural Leadership Task Force, was chaired by Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture CEO Tom Schorgl.

Cigarette sellers began to charge the extra tax in early February, but it takes time for tax stamps to be counted and payments to be made. Boyle says after that first wire transfer, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture's subsequent funds will come in monthly. From May through December she's expecting to see about $14 million in tax revenue from more than 45 million packs of cigarettes. A full year's haul is predicted to be about $20 million.

Boyle has been carrying a dog-eared copy of Ohio Revised Code chapter 3381, which governs the establishment of tax districts for the arts, highlighted and tagged with post-it notes for easy flipping. Already she's asking to change one of the rules. It says the arts tax district will be accountable to three directors, two of which have to be professionals at arts and cultural organizations. She hopes the board can be expanded to five so that it can be more diverse, especially in its connections to the arts organizations it will fund. She's expecting the Cuyahoga County commissioners to appoint those directors at their meeting this Thursday. They'll be her bosses, deliberating and setting policies.

She doesn't know who those directors will be yet. Schorgl and the CAC's advisory committee have both submitted their recommendations, and Schorgl says others have made suggestions as well for the influential volunteer posts. But the names are being kept private.

"The new board has a lot to do," Boyle says. "They have to set policy. What kind of evaluation are we going to want? What are we going to want back from grant recipients? Is it about building audiences, marketing? All that has to be flushed out."

It's likely that CAC funding policies will substantially reflect the "investment models" described by Schorgl and the Cultural Leadership Task Force in 2004. The potential community and economic impact of publicly funding the arts — the way it could shape the survival of organizations, but also push an entrepreneurial agenda — becomes clear upon looking into the details of those funding programs.

In the category Artist Support Fund, for example, criteria include "ability of the work to advance the region's image as a producer and exporter of innovative artistic work," and "ability of the project to positively impact Cuyahoga County's economy." Both of those are a long way from focusing purely on art.

In final grant reports, which will help funders evaluate the success, those grant recipients will be asked to report on "such items as the number of jobs created and/or retained, additional dollars leveraged, diversity of community served and audience development."

So while a slice of the economy has been carved out for artists, it's not about art for art's sake.

But the biggest piece of the investment will be in organizations that are already contributing to the economy in the ways Schorgl has so painstakingly documented in the years of research that preceded the passage of the tax last November. The money will help to replace corporate funding which in decades past offered millions of dollars in annual support, especially to major downtown organizations, but also to neighborhood arts centers offering educational and outreach experience.

Boyle says about 80 percent of the revenue is to be given to organizations for operating support, but assures that the funding formulas guarantee that the biggest organizations won't take all the money. Those with budgets in the tens of millions would get no more than 3 percent of their budgets from the tax fund, while smaller ones might get up to 25 percent.

Next year rules will be in place for individual artist and project-based grants, which the investment models state could be $5,000 for emerging artists to $15,000 for established ones. But the first year, CAC will only give grants for organizational operating support.

Boyle is hoping to offer seminars for nonprofits to learn about the application process in May or June. Applications will be due in the summer, with the panel judging process taking place after Labor Day. The board of directors would approve grants near the end of September, and the checks would go out.

Boyle observes that there has been some discussion among the county commissioners about whether those disbursements should be held until January 2008 in order to create a buffer of savings. The subject was "heavily debated," Boyle says.

For now, though, Boyle is just looking forward to the commissioners meeting, so she can find out who her bosses will be.

"I'm at a point where I need to be allowed to make decisions," she says. "I need a bank account. We're coming up on the time when the money is going to be there."