Samsø Municipality has paid around 140.000 DKK to the financial fund Fonden Aarhus 2017, but the President of the Committee on Culture doesn’t believe the culture on Samsø has been boosted.
By Johanne Jedig Wejse
In a small house with thatched roofs by the beach of the city Ballen on Samsø, Ulla Holm is looking through her papers. She became the President of the Committee on Culture and Social Affairs after the local election in 2018. She is looking through her papers to see if she can find the numbers from the European Capital of Culture 2017, where Samsø was included as part of the Central Danish Region. But she is coming up short.
“The Return of Investment says that we received 280% of our investment, but I’ve been trying to find out who received all those funds, and it’s weird – but I can’t find it anywhere,” says Ulla Holm. “It seems to have drowned in bureaucracy.”
It seems that the main beneficiary of the funds is the Academy of Energy, which is also located in the city Ballen on Samsø.
Some of the funds have gone towards Peter Christensen, who is a project manager at the Academy of Energy in the Aarhus department, and whose salary was partly covered by the financial fund Fonden Aarhus 2017.
“We work a lot with sustainability at the Academy of Energy, and we were paid by Fonden Aarhus 2017 to make a guide for including sustainability during the Capital of Culture. When we finished the guide in 2016, the fund had changed its secretariat, and the new secretariat weren’t as interested in sustainability. So the guide was never really used,” explains Peter Christensen.
He doesn’t think the work by the Academy of Energy really had anything to do with Samsø Municipality, other than the fact that it is located on Samsø.
“Even though the project was funded by the financial fund, it didn’t have anything to do with Samsø or boosting the culture on Samsø, other than coincidentally being located on Samsø,” says Peter Christensen. “So most of the funding for Samsø was for something that didn’t boost the culture on Samsø, and for a project that wasn’t really used anyways.”
Ulla Holm agrees with the analysis from Peter Christensen:
“I have to be critical of the fact that the financial fund, where we have sent most of our funding for culture over the years, didn’t have any strong impact on our municipality.”
However, if Ulla could go back in time and decline sending their funding for culture to Aarhus being the European Capital of Culture, she wouldn’t:
“I think being the European Capital of Culture has really benefited Aarhus, and we don’t mind helping Aarhus and building our cooperation with Aarhus stronger. I think it’s fine that being the European Capital of Culture has boosted Aarhus so strongly, but I don’t think they should brag about boosting the smaller municipalities when it isn’t true.”
The secretariat from the financial fund Fonden Aarhus 2017 has declined to comment on the case, but Chief Consultant of Culture in Aarhus Municipality Lene Øster says:
“A large, intermunicipal collaboration such as this can be difficult, but we believe that everyone benefited from being part of it.”
