The county museums have strongly criticized the fact that the state's funding is too small. According to a report from the Swedish Agency for Cultural Analysis, museums have been forced to terminate almost one in ten employees between 2003 and 2017, and in an open letter to the Ministry of Culture, the County Administrative Council recently warned that more than one in three county museums will have to cut staff 2020.
But the government's autumn budget shows no extended grants to the country's county museum.
"We see redundancies ahead of us"- We are, of course, disappointed. There were expectations that the government would increase the appropriation for regional culture. The list of one and a half percent that we now see does not cover our wage increases and price increases. This means continued savings in the county museums. We see redundancies ahead of us, says Jonas Hellberg (S), chairman of the county museums' cooperation council.
He believes that the cultural budget is too Stockholm-centered.
- We think it is a weak first cultural budget that is directed to Stockholm. The investments that are available on free entrance and compensations for, among other things, the National Museum are as much as we are; The music, the art, the theater, the county museums in the country will share together, says Jonas Hellberg.
- This is strange because the government is otherwise profiling itself with sparsely populated politics.