Mayor Ballard’s budget proposal drew a sigh of relief from arts advocates last week.

He only wants to cut public funding for the arts by a third.

But in Indianapolis, that’s considered good news. At present, the city invests approximately $1.5 million of its billion dollar-plus budget in the arts. Although a national study has shown that the city actually makes $5 on every arts dollar it invests, this is apparently not enough to make city leaders want to preserve this line of the Parks and Recreation budget.

You have to wonder how many other lines in the city’s budget have this rate of return, but never mind.

Indianapolis is in danger of reverting back to its sleepy old self in at least a couple of ways. Though many of us have learned to talk a decent game about the value of the arts, we still distrust anything we can’t immediately understand. How else can we account for the thousands of words The Indianapolis Star lavished on trying to keep locals from hating the Chakaia Booker exhibition of public art? “Keep an open mind,” The Star’s well-meaning sequence of articles implored, implying that the expectation — or should I say fear? — was otherwise.

You would have thought that after eight years of Bart Peterson’s insistence on making the arts and culture a cornerstone of his administration, our collective appreciation for the arts might have moved farther along than that. But Peterson discovered an inconvenient truth on his way to making Indianapolis a “cultural destination”: Most people who live here don’t understand anything about the arts. That’s why he never made the attempt to sell his vision to the people at large, preferring to save his enthusiasm about cultural policy for speeches and public appearances at arts events.

It’s also why Peterson never made good on the one practical arts-related promise he made during his first run for office: to pull the arts budget out of Parks and Recreation and give it a line of its own. But that would have meant a showdown with the City-County Council, a political donnybrook Peterson apparently felt he couldn’t win — even when he had sky-high approval ratings.

Now that the Republicans are in charge, it’s been breathtaking to see the speed with which they have chosen to go after this small, but symbolic, fraction of the city’s budget. They know that in the minds of many constituents cutting the arts equals cutting fluff, if not downright waste. Forget about the return on the dollars spent and the inconsequential impact this cut will have on the city’s very real fiscal problems. As long as the word “art” appears anywhere in the city budget, they know they’ll have voters barking at them. What’s worse is that they’re too lazy to learn how to answer back.

But something else is going on here. Many of our elected officials share a belief that government can’t do anything as well as the private sector. This means that the last thing they want to see is a publicly-funded program that actually works. When that happens, it challenges everything they stand for. And so a program that repays community investment five times over sets a dangerous precedent.

“Don’t worry,” say the city’s budget cutters. Even with cuts to public money, the arts can still receive their annual million dollars from the Capital Improvements Board. But this is like whistling past a graveyard. The CIB has its hands full with Lucas Oil Stadium. If this summer’s $5.6 million flood is any indicator, maintenance for that building will likely be more costly than anyone has planned for. Don’t be surprised if that’s where that extra million eventually winds up.

Which will be ironic. During the Peterson years, the economist Richard Florida’s research regarding “the Creative Class” had a lot of people talking, especially given Indy’s lamentable brain drain. Young professionals, Florida said, could care less about sports stadiums. They look for cities that offer world-class arts experiences, social tolerance and mass transit.

I wonder what they’ll say about a city that symbolically slashes arts funding and calls that fiscal responsibility. We used to have a name for it: Naptown.