NOT so much a 'lifeline' as a shore in sight is how David Bilton, executive director of Ross International Festival, describes Herefordshire Council's stance on future funding for the event.

To reach that shore the Festival now needs to negotiate with the council for a guaranteed £20,000 a year, for three years, as a boost to an annual £50,000 it expects from the Arts Council until 2006.

Mr Bilton said that - in turn - the event will almost certainly have to scale down to about eight days which would be 'more manageable' in terms of ticket sales.

But it was, said Mr Bilton, too early to talk of the Festival being thrown a 'lifeline'.

"We have a lot of talking to do with the council over the next month."Meantime, said Mr Bilton, planning for a reduced programme next year was underway.

Mr Bilton was responding to the findings of a festival funding review by the council's social and economic development scrutiny committee.

The issue was under the spotlight after Ross Festival asked for a substantial increase on the £20,000 it received from the council toward this year's re-launched event to ensure that next year's went ahead.

A shortfall in ticket sales left the event needing - at initial calculation - another £100,000 to survive.

But by scaling back its running time that comes down. Organisers are assessing how many days they can cut from the programme to work within available money.

Put to the scrutiny committee last week, the report found the current scale of the Festival - with a turnover of £770,000 - not viable. And where current funders did not have additional resources to invest, reductions were required in production and/or salary costs.

Ambitious

The report did, however, praise the event as potentially the 'largest and most ambitious' of its kind in the county.

Scrutiny committee chair councillor Chris Chappell also stressed that the report's recommendations did not represent a 'lifeline' for the festival but a basis for negotiations by which a 'lifeline' could be thrown.

The report also recommended that the other events examined - Herefordshire Photography Festival (Exposure), Leominster Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival and the Three Choirs Festival - took a 'realistic look' at what was needed to keep them as secure as the review found them to be.

In future, their council funding could also come as an agreed three-year sum rather than through an annual grant, according to the review.

Councillor Roy Stockton, cabinet member for community and economic development, is 'currently considering' the review's findings - which should come before cabinet itself sometime soon.