To keep the music playing, the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians (HAAM) has dialed up the City of Austin for a hefty $500,000 in next year's fiscal budget, intended to fund health insurance for more than 2,000 local musicians struggling to hit high notes in medical coverage, as reported by the Austin Monitor.

HAAM CEO Paul Scott is set to pitch the proposal at the Music Commission meeting, aiming to split the funds between premium support and operational costs to keep musicians in tune with insurance enrollment periods, and although HAAM has managed to pull in under $100,000 from the city's pockets in recent past, this time they're composing a much larger score, hoping to hedge against the ever-fluctuating premium costs and the unpredictable merry-go-round of insurance providers in Texas.

Paul Scott told the Austin Monitor, "We kind of wait and see what’s going to happen with premium increases... That’s always the big question mark. This year we didn’t see a huge amount of increases, but some years we have and so that impacts how many musicians we can actually serve." Scott is also orchestrating a bid to get city commissioners to endorse a similar financial backing to supplement HAAM's $4.6 million annual budget, which mainly jives from fundraisers, private donors, and their unpredictable generosity.

Dampening these efforts however, Austin's city magnates are already tuning up for a tight budget with a projected $15 million cadence of shortfall in sales tax revenue, leaving them to perhaps consider snipping contributions to the budget reserve fund to make up for the bass drop, as the city prepares to wave goodbye to the federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, potentially orchestrating a return to a pre-pandemic symphony of services and spending that could see HAAM's request facing a tough crowd.

As the city's quality of life commissions strike up their budget requests and the City Council warms up for an April midyear financial review, HAAM's plea faces a summer of high temperatures and potentially heated deliberations over the fiscal future of Austin's musicians. Photo credits go to Earl McGehee for providing the snapshot under a Creative Commons license, as per the Austin Monitor, whose work hits the right notes thanks to community donors listed transparently on their website.