By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- American Dance Festival organizers are once again complaining about what they see as the paltry size of the cash subsidy their event gets from the city.

City Manager Tom Bonfield has proposed giving the summer dance festival $36,000 from Durham's downtown fund in fiscal 2010-11, a cut from the $46,055 it received in the current budget.

The cut proposal drew objections late last month from ADF Co-Director Jodee Nimerichter, who also complained that her event for at least the second year running is in line to receive less than the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Bonfield proposed giving Full Frame $55,000, down from the $65,000 earmarked for it in the fiscal 2009-10 budget.

Nimerichter penned several e-mails to City Councilman Mike Woodard, the council's point man on arts issues, noting that the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau recently estimated that ADF contributed nearly $5.6 million to the local economy in 2009.

Full Frame, by contrast, contributed about $1.5 million. Visitors Bureau analysts figured the city got $185,187 in tax revenue from ADF, and $48,110 from Full Frame.

"As you can imagine, I would like someone to explain how ADF's economic impact can be more than three times greater than Full Frame's and our support $19,000 less," Nimerichter said in a May 27 e-mail to Woodard after the council reviewed Bonfield's proposals on festival contributions.

But Woodard isn't anticipating that his colleagues will make any changes to the contributions before approving the budget on June 21.

"In a year where we again are going through a reduction in workforce and are not able to give our employees pay increases, I didn't see how we could increase the amount of their city grant," Woodard said.

Deputy City Manager Wanda Page also noted that the cash grant isn't the only financial support the two festivals get from city government.

ADF receives a $122,500 price break on its rent of the Durham Performing Arts Center during its seven-week run, Page said.

Full Frame uses the Durham Armory. The city waives about $6,000 in rent for the use of that facility, in return for sponsorship rights, Page said.

ADF officials also squawked about the size of their subsidy in 2007, a month or so after a roughly 10-percent cut dropped the city's cash contribution to $56,858.

Dance festival Director Charles Reinhart that year said the cut made him question whether "the city really wants ADF in Durham."

ADF's most recent available IRS filing, for 2007-08, shows it took in $3.7 million in revenue, $86,551 more than it spent on operations that included staging performances, training dancers and public-service projects.

Full Frame, meanwhile, reported taking in $938,547 in fiscal 2007-08. Its operations cost $1.1 million, so it lost $143,107 on the year.