Budget law 2020: here are the measures that affect culture

The legislativeprocess of the Budget Law for 2020 has officially begun: let’s take a detailed look at what measures affecting culture are in the bill at the moment. It starts with App 18, the culture bonus for 18-year-olds, which is renewed for 2020 as well, with an allocation of 160 million euros. It will still be possible, therefore, to buy theater, cinema and live show tickets, books, subscriptions to newspapers, recorded music, audiovisual publishing products, access tickets to museums, exhibitions and cultural events, monuments, galleries, archaeological sites and natural parks, and it will still be usable to support costs related to music, theater or foreign language courses. At the moment, it is not yet known whether for each 18-year-old the bonus will still be 500 euros: the amount will be decreed by MiBAC later.

The Finance Bill 2020 also includes an allocation of 22.5 million euros to be allocated to MiBAC’s non-managerial staff “for allowances having the character of certainty, continuity and stability, determined by decree of the Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism in agreement with the Minister of Economy and Finance.” The bill also contains a measure to allocate part of the proceeds from the ticketing of state museums to the payment of overtime of the ministry’s workers, “in order to cope with the unpostponable and unbreakable exceptional work needs related to the po1ment of the operation of services and the performance of specific activities in the field of cultural heritage.” Overtime subsidized by museum tickets will also be used, Minister Dario Franceschini explained in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore, to guarantee extra museum openings.

The allocations of the Single Fund for Performing Arts are then increased: for the FUS, a 10 million euro increase. Still regarding cinema, an additional 75 million euros are guaranteed for the allocation of the Fund for the Development of Investments in the Cinema and Audiovisual Industry. An important measure concernspublishing: public schools that purchase subscriptions to periodicals get a subsidy of up to 80 percent of the expenditure incurred (allocations amount to 20 million euros).

The bill also establishes a Fund for investment in favor of municipalities, which will be managed by the Ministry of the Interior and will be used in the areas of public construction (including maintenance and safety and energy efficiency), maintenance of the road network, hydrogeological instability, seismic risk prevention, and the enhancement of cultural and environmental assets.

Finally, a “National Innovative Program for Urban Revitalization” is established, which will be used to upgrade the building stock. The Ministries of Infrastructure, Economy and Finance will subsequently establish the deadlines, contents and modalities for submitting proposals, the amount of contributions recognizable to redevelopment projects, and the criteria for evaluating proposals (in particular, priority will be given to interventions involving public housing buildings, the recovery and enhancement of cultural heritage, and the zero consumption of new land through interventions of recovery, redevelopment and functional densification of already urbanized areas).

Obviously, since this is a bill, all measures are subject to change in the next steps.

Budget law 2020: here are the measures that affect culture

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