THE FIGHT TO SAVE AID TO MUSEUMS

Supporters of the arts, which are facing severe budget cuts, got to tell their side of the story on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Against the backdrop of debate over $100 million in aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, the House appropriations interior subcommittee led off daylong arts hearings with testimony on the $20.5-million budget for the Institute of Museum Services. The Reagan Administration is seeking, once again, to demolish the agency.

But subcommittee chairman Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.) made it clear from the start that he does not intend to see that happen.

In fact, Yates said, “I have a feeling that $21 million” would be needed “to perpetuate” the Museum Services agency. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities individually have budgets more than six times the size of the threatened museum agency.

The $21-million figure is about what the agency received for the current fiscal year, which began last Oct. 1--prior to the 4.3% mandatory cut March 1 applied to most domestic programs under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing law.

“IMS is an important agency,” said Yates, who has been the point man in the last five Reagan budgets in seeing to it that the 10-year-old agency has not been eliminated. “IMS hasn’t had the period of growth time of the other agencies, and its appropriation is modest.”

The institute, established more than a decade after the National Endowment for the Arts, is the only federal agency that provides operational support at up to 10% of an organization’s budget--and a $75,000 maximum in a particular year--to art museums as well as historical and scientific museums, botanical gardens, zoos and acquariums.

Last year, more than 600 institutions across the nation--including 32 in California--received operational support from IMS, including $75,000 to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and $5,000 to the Olivas Adobe Historical Park in Ventura.

Museum Services also has a conservation program and a museum assessment program. With a staff of 13, its post-Gramm-Rudman administrative budget is $761,000, or 3.7% of its overall budget.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Administration is proposing $330,000 for the agency for fiscal ‘87--to phase it out. Included in that money is $68,000-plus a year for a new director. Lois Burke Shepard, of Potomac, Md., is the Administration’s nominee. Until recently Shepard ran Republicans Abroad for the Republican National Committee, an operation designed to bring in the vote of overseas Americans for Republican candidates.

In the Senate Wednesday, Shepard received the approval of the Labor and Human Resources Committee. Her nomination is expected to go to the Senate floor shortly.

“We all know that the federal budget is out of balance, and that steps must be taken to correct this dangerous condition,” Robert R. MacDonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York and president of the American Assn. of Museums, wrote in a statement admitted to the official record. “But do we also appreciate that the comparatively paltry sums the federal government appropriates are also out of balance?”

MacDonald, who could not be present because he was ill, added that while he wasn’t going to “compare the appropriations for the endowments and the Institute of Museum Services to the cost of a missile or a bridge on an interstate highway . . . the intellectual, aesthetic, historic and spiritual values” that museums help preserve “are the true strength of the American people.”

William B. Macomber, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pointing out the importance of the Museum Services conservation program, told the subcommittee that “if by some disaster” he had only three people left in his employ, it would not be a director or even a curator “but two guards and a conservator.”

Elaine Heumann Gurian, associate director of the Children’s Museum in Boston, who has been a frequent recipient of Museum Services grants, said that while her 75-year-old institution with a $3.5-million annual budget has managed to acquire “a small surplus” for 13 of the last 15 years, “when budget times comes around, there is always more to do than the budget will allow and more dreams are disappointed than I care to remember. It is at that time that general operating support of IMS appears as the most welcome of financial angels, for everyone knows that operating support is the hardest to raise. . . .

“It is the glamour issues that command restricted grants and go forward,” Gurian continued, “while the essential but unfundable issues get cut.”

Gurian noted that in 1981, her museum used IMS money to hire a business manager and support his first-year salary. “The business office is still with us and works fine,” she said.

In 1983, she went on, the Children’s Museum, 45% of whose patrons are adults, moved downtown, and it took three months to relocate. Without assistance from Museum Services, “we would have been without three months of revenue from admission income--a critical loss.”

In 1984, Gurian said Museum Services “allowed us to computerize throughout the building so we could computerize climate control. . . .”

Gurian cited several other examples, concluding: “IMS funding for us at the Children’s Museum makes it possible for us to keep our doors open, our people employed, for the institution to improve our offerings, and allows us time to protect ourselves. . . . IMS alone understands (about) unglamorous money.”

Meanwhile it also appeared that despite Gramm-Rudman, the comparable Senate approrpriations interior subcommittee, chaired by Sen. James McClure (R-Ida.) would not side with the Reagan budget when it hears testimony on the Museum Services budget next month. Said a source close to the committee: “There hasn’t been a fight (with the Yates subcommittee) for the past five years. I don’t see why there should be one this year.”