State of the City 2026: Arts & Culture 📍 Vancouver, WA

The State of the City address for 2026, given by Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle, was held at the Arts Hub and was focused around Vancouver's commitment to arts, culture & heritage. Today's episode, part of our Advocacy and Action series, shares some key takeaways of the event. Check it out!

• Watch the full State of the City here 
• Inspire Vancouver Cultural Access Program
• Susan Dingle, Clark County Poet Laureate 
• Vancouver Ballet Folklórico  
• Vietnamese Community of Clark County 

Catch up on related episodes:

• Vancouver Ballet Folklórico
• The Arts Hub
• Clark County Historical Museum
• Vancouver Arts and Music Festival

Transcript

State of the City (Vancouver) 2026

Today I am going to be talking about Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle’s Vancouver State of the City address that was given March 9th, 2026. Mayor Anne decided to host the State of the City address at the Vancouver Arts Hub. Because she talked a lot about the importance of arts, culture, and heritage to our community, and she announced some pretty cool things that I can't wait to share with you today.

Welcome to I’m Into This Place, your deep dive into the local arts, culture, and heritage of Clark County. From fabulous new restaurants to quirky art installations to the historical sites you never even knew to look for, we’re inviting you along. Whether you're a Clark County connoisseur or just starting to get to know her, get ready to fall head over heels for this place we call home. I'm your host, Adriana Baer, and I'm into this place. Let's go.

One of the things that was so fun about the State of the City event this year was that there were a number of cultural organizations who performed, and we started off with the Vietnamese Community of Clark County doing a lion dance with some drumming and music. You can see some videos of that online.

In fact, the entire State of the City address was broadcast live, and there is a link to the whole address in the show notes. So if you're interested in watching those performances or seeing Mayor Anne's entire speech, you can go directly there. Right before Mayor Anne spoke, Susan Dingle, the Clark County Poet Laureate came up and read her beautiful poem, which I'm going to share with you now to get us started.

For the State of the City, March 9th, 2026. Maybe a street corner mural says it best. Unity is strength. As I drive south on Washington Boulevard on the way to where the highways meet and divide, one south toward the river, the other north toward the sea. Equity was never just a word, but a way of affirming who we are.

In the rain, we stood together on the corner of Esther Short Park at noon in a vigil every Wednesday until daffodils appeared like an affirmation that no matter how rainy the weather, our spring will come. For Vancouver people still offer hospitality, shelter, and provision to all, even when it's complicated, to foster a harmony of belonging on an unceded land once a fortress, now a port, and yet the old saying still rings true. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many one. We listen and see what that feels like in Vancouver, how it echoes in every neighborhood, in every park and playground where all our children find belonging. And yes, we all belong. Thank you.

The State of the City took place at the Arts Hub, and I'm going to talk all about that space in just a moment. But it was significant because the mayor really wanted to talk a lot about arts culture and heritage here in our community, and it was nice to be surrounded by so much arts and culture activities, a gallery exhibit that's going on at the Arts Hub.

And as I mentioned before, starting and ending with performance, poetry, dance. And it felt really good to be in a large room with a whole lot of people, all of whom were there to hear about the state of the city, but through the lens and in relationship to the arts. So what a fabulous time to be part of Vancouver.

I wanna talk about what Mayor Anne said specifically about arts and culture, and I'm also gonna tell you some of the other things that she talked about that just seems somewhat relevant. So, for example, we got an update on the Main Street Promise. That's all the work that's been happening on Main Street.

One of the things that Mayor Anne shared with us was that as they were digging up the streets and finding all of these old things in the middle of the road, like tracks from the old streetcar, they decided to document, preserve, and protect those items in order to help tell the story of Vancouver's history.

It really made me think about the Clark County Historical Museum and all the wonderful work that Brad Richardson and his team are doing there. We've shared that episode a few times on the podcast and they have actually a new entryway into the museum and they're turning that space into a visitor center.

So when people come to the area, they can really dig deep into that local history and find out more about what's going on in the present as well. So it was nice to hear a shout out for the preservation of Vancouver's history. The goal with the Main Street Project is also to make the street not just more bikeable, more walkable, more shoppable, but also to make it a Festival Street. 

So for example, when the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival is going on in Esther Short Park every summer, they're interested in expanding and coming up Main Street to have performances on the corners and that kind of thing. 

The lodging tax, which taxes hotel beds on hotels above a certain number of rooms, provided support for 12 events last year, over 75,000 visitors. So this lodging tax - we are not the only city that has something like this - but this lodging tax is really an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to funding arts and culture events.

Groups that receive funding from the lodging tax include, of course, the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival and also the Día de Muertos Festival that's produced by Vancouver Ballet Folklórico, that kind of thing. The Vancouver City Council also has an admissions tax and on things like movie tickets, that kind of thing, and it funds increased cultural opportunities and supports the operation and capital costs

of the city's arts and culture facilities, including the Arts Hub. Now that is not a new tax, but I was happy to hear a little bit more about how that was used. The city back in 2018 passed a culture, arts, and heritage plan that was really put in place to advance Vancouver's cultural landscape.

The 2023 through ‘29 Vancouver Strategic Plan includes arts, culture, and heritage, especially equitable access to arts, culture, and heritage. Direct support to the local creative economy, and also indirect support like leveraging other resources, creating infrastructure, and creating policies that remove barriers to arts and culture organizations and their success.

The city has expanded the arts district, they've grown the public art program, and they've supported 40 plus arts, culture, and heritage programs and events. I also, of course, need to talk about the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival. Now, this festival is kind of the. Cornerstone. I would say at this point, the kind of bright, shiny light in our city's arts and culture programming for the public.

This is a relationship, uh, collaboration, I should say, between the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the City of Vancouver. Last year, over 50,000 people were in the Esther Short Park coming to downtown to see what was going on at the festival. Those are locals, but also visitors. And what I always think is such a wonderful statistic to remember is that visitors spend twice as much as their local counterparts on things like hotel rooms, food, parking, when they come to see an arts and culture event. So it really helps increase our local economy. There were 250 artists, performers, and musicians demonstrating their work at the festival, and the festival of course, is free. It's free to everybody. So it eliminates those financial and social barriers to the arts for all residents and businesses.

The festival brought in about $1.6 million in local business sales. So that is a real boost for our local economy, and that's just in that one weekend. The Vancouver Arts and Music Festival was named the Event of the Year by the Washington Festivals and Events Association, so that's really exciting. This year's festival is August 7th through ninth at Esther Short Park and I will be there and I hope to see you there too. 

Mayor Anne also talked about how they've been expanding arts and culture spaces. As I mentioned before, we were at the Arts Hub for the State of the City address. The Arts Hub is run by Christine Richardson and her nonprofit, The Arts Centered. If you want to know more about what's going on there , you can listen back to our episode about the Arts Hub that we gave an update on at the end of 2025.

The city committed in 2023 to turning the Arts Hub into a space for the arts and a cultural center. And currently we are in this initial activation phase.

And what that means is, the city needs to do a bunch of renovations on this building to make it more safe, but in the meantime, the space is being used by cultural organizations, arts groups, uh, sometimes they have gallery shows. They have performances, they have art studio space, they have rehearsal space.

It's really incredible. Over 15,000 people visited the space in 2025, and they hosted over 2000 hours of programming. The final design for the space is going to be community informed. They're really digging in deep and talking to the people who use the space and also the people who come to it, and eventually it will include better studios, dance and performance spaces, outdoor areas and more. It's a flexible space with minimal barriers, and that's one of the main things that we really need in our community. 

The mayor also talked about the hopeful future for the performing arts center, which doesn't exist yet. You haven't missed anything.

But in 2024, the city council convened a performing arts stakeholder group to evaluate the feasibility of building a performing arts center downtown. The goal of this is to energize the core, the downtown core, support businesses, attract visitors, stimulate economic activity year round, and give local organizations the opportunities they need to grow their audiences and their impact. Groups from outside of the region would be able to come and perform here, as well as part of their touring program. 

They really want to expand the access to arts education, create pathways to creative careers, and inspire the next generation. So stay tuned for what's going to happen with the performing arts center as they really delve deeply into the finances and the reality of building something like this.

In terms of arts education, the mayor really highlighted the importance of arts, culture, and heritage for young people, how it fosters a sense of belonging, it gives people a pathway to future careers, and it connects us to our own community and our own history.

They played a short video from the Evergreen School District, which showed some of their students, creating films, um, playing music, singing. It was a really, really wonderful short mini documentary about what's going on in the Evergreen schools in the arts. And if you wanna watch it, you can click on the link in the show notes to watch the entire State of the City address. The video from Evergreen is kind of towards the end of the event, but it's really worth watching.

Mayor Anne believes that the city has a responsibility to increase and broaden access to arts, culture, and heritage. And because of that, she was very excited to formally announce the Inspire Vancouver Cultural Access Program. Now, Inspire Vancouver has come out of a statewide program that we, in the city limits of Vancouver, are now a part of.

The city council enacted a 0.1% sales tax inside of the city of Vancouver that is specifically used to fund arts culture, heritage and science programming. Now, the cultural sales tax, will net us about $7 million a year for arts, culture, heritage, and science programming in the city of Vancouver.

This is so, so exciting, and the people who are really organizing this program are the Culture, Arts and Heritage Commission at the city, which is in relationship with Parks, Rec, and Cultural Services. The idea here is that we will invest across the community on new ideas, ongoing work, capital improvements, and connecting students to cultural experiences.

So this means bringing students in, helping pay for their field trips, their buses, so that they're able to engage with culture, arts, heritage, and science experiences all throughout the city. They're also interested in investing in ideas. They really want citizens to connect to arts, culture, heritage, and science in their daily life.

So absolutely stay tuned for more details about the Inspire Vancouver program. I will have a special episode all about the sales tax and the program when they are ready to announce the grantmaking part of the project. In other words, how they're giving this $7 million away every single year. This is a real game changer for our community.

It infuses Vancouver - and hopefully will be replicated in the rest of the towns around Clark County - but it infuses us with a huge amount of money to put back into arts culture, heritage and science programming here in Vancouver.

So I'm so excited that she was finally able to announce this really, really cool initiative. Now, there were so many other things that Mayor Anne talked about in her approximately 45-minute long speech. If you want to watch the full State of the City address, the link to that is in the show notes. 

I've also got links there to Susan Dingle, the Clark County poet Laureate. The Vietnamese Community of Clark County who started us off with a wonderful lion dance, the Inspire Vancouver Cultural Access Program information, and Vancouver Ballet Folklórico who finished out the evening with a couple of beautiful dances. And so to finish out this podcast episode, I'll let you listen to the wonderful sounds of Vancouver Ballet Folklórico.

Thank you so much for listening to this special episode, recapping some of what Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle talked about in her state of the city address for 2026 at the Arts Hub. I think the future is looking really bright for arts, culture, and heritage here in Vancouver and in Clark County in general, and I'm so happy to be a part of it.

Thanks for being with us on I'm Into This Place.