By Margaret A. McGurk
The Cincinnati Enquirer

City Council's decision to cut its contribution to the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Film Commission leaves the organization with a $35,000 gap in its $200,000 budget for 2003.

Executive director Kristen Erwin called the decision a setback, but said she plans to stick with an ambitious marketing plan to pull more movie, TV and commercial productions to the area.

The commission will cut "nothing, if we can help it, other than trimming and refining," she said. "We can't cut, we're too small as it is!"

It could have been worse; the city's initial budget proposal called for eliminating the entire $60,000 that the city contributed to the film commission in 2002.

Said council finance committee chairman John Cranley, "The unfortunate answer is that we had a $35 million deficit. We did the best that we could. The administration recommended they get nothing, and we restored as much we could under difficult circumstances."

Fund-raising will make up the difference, Ms. Erwin said.

Ms. Erwin said she hopes eventually the commission can operate without public funds. Ohio, Kentucky and Cincinnati now provide about half of its budget.

The commission calculates that visiting productions return $50 for every $1 spent on attracting them. The feature film Seabiscuit recently shot in Kentucky hired dozens of local crew members, hundreds of extras and spent thousands on scouting locations in Cincinnati, Ms. Erwin said, even though the film ultimately did not shoot any scenes in the city.

Goals for 2003 include a Web site, a direct-mail campaign and a much bigger library of sites available to filmmakers.

"The city's support both financially and collectively is crucial to our mission," she said. "We will continue to be aggressive in bringing economic impact to the community . . . and we will be even more aggressive in making sure the city is aware of it."

E-mail mmcgurk@enquirer.com