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Faced with a serious downturn in public and private funding since Sept. 11, Queens' cultural institutions have begun to slash their budgets, laying off staff and cutting hours of operation.
And while they are still making decisions about how to cope with less money, nearly every museum, concert hall and performance group in the borough expects things to get worse before they get better.
"We'd like to think it's an interim thing, but bad news has been coming out of City Hall pretty steadily," said Jo-Ann Jones, executive director of the Flushing Council on Culture & the Arts. "Decreasing the budget looks like the only way we can get by."
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered city agencies on Oct. 9 to collectively cut at least $1 billion from their budgets to match the estimated loss of tax revenues following the World Trade Center attacks.
A handful of agencies like the Board of Education as well as the police, fire and sanitation departments sustained relatively minor cuts of 2.5 percent. But most, including the Department of Cultural Affairs - which funds more than 500 institutions in New York City - were ordered to trim their budgets by 15 percent.
That hits especially hard at...