Museums Brace for Fund Change

It’s that time of year--birds sing, jacarandas bloom and San Diego museum directors get nervous. The City Council is about to decide who gets what pieces of the transient occupancy tax pie.

To make the museum keepers more fidgety, there’s a change in the allocation rules this year. The city is using a new formula to set the size of allocations, and some museums fear they’ll be cut out of the money altogether.

Museums apply directly to the city for funding, while performing arts groups apply to COMBO, a private arts fund-raising agency which gets a lump-sum allocation of TOT money (taxes on hotel and motel visitors) from the city to distribute.

The new funding criteria for museums stress the ability to attract tourists. While some museums may receive more money this year, the city staff has recommended that others receive no funds or drastically reduced funds.

‘I’m Crying’

“I’m not mad. I’m crying,” said Paul Fordem, executive director of the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, which is pegged to receive no funds next year. For the last two years, the museum, which runs its miniature train operations on a relatively small $120,000 budget, received $11,000 in TOT funds from the city, and “$11,000 is a drop in the bucket to some people and organizations, but it’s a goodly portion of our budget,” Fordem said.

Fordem, a former San Diego County supervisor, called the recommended cut “crippling,” but said he plans to appeal to the full City Council to restore some funding.

One of the hardest hit will be the San Diego Museum of Natural History. The city’s financial analysts have recommended that more than $100,000 be cut from the museum’s usual allocation.

The natural history museum has been in the limelight recently following last month’s discovery of a dinosaur skeleton near Carlsbad. Museum scientists are busily removing the fossil--the first of its kind found west of the Rockies--from its ancient rock encasement.

The proposed $100,000 cut in revenue shocked museum officials, who are trying to find $50,000 to pay for the unbudgeted costs of preparing the dinosaur skeleton.

“We are a science museum,” said Richard S. Bundy, president of the museum’s board of trustees. “We have a very heavy research commitment, a heavy curatorial responsibility.”

But research and developing a collection do not figure as highly as tourist-drawing exhibits in the proposed city equation for shelling out funds. The percentage of the Natural History Museum’s budget devoted to exhibits did not stack up well when compared with museums such as the San Diego Museum of Art, which city staff recommended for a TOT fund increase next year.

Bundy nevertheless was surprised at the proposed cut--from $336,855 this year to $231,572 next year--from the current $1.4 million budget. “We find that fully half of the people who come into our museum are out-of-towners.”

The proposed TOT fund cut would be a hardship but not devastating, museum officials said. “Probably we’re going to have to significantly increase our admission charge from $3 to $4,” Bundy said. “We’re going to have to put off some new things for the next five years on our master exhibits plan,” for which the museum is committed to raise $500,000 a year for capital improvements over and above its operating expenses.

City staff also recommended that the Mingei Museum of folk arts receive no funding. Both the Mingei and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Arts, which was recommended for a $100,000 grant from the city, are also applying to COMBO (the Combined Arts and Education Council of San Diego County) for performing arts funds.

Wrestling With Budget

City Council members have been wrestling with the TOT budget, which also funds the Convention and Visitors Bureau and other tourist-oriented agencies. Council members acknowledged that the new application criteria for museums is tough.

“The cultural groups are taking it in the neck this year,” said City Councilwoman Judy McCarty. “Maybe the list has gotten too long. Maybe (the money) should go to traditional groups. I do think we have to fund things that bring in tourists. That’s where my priorities lie.”

Councilwoman Gloria McColl said that cultural philanthropy must take second place to other concerns. Higher priority must go to “replacing infrastructure, sewers, streets,” she said. “The health and safety of our citizens has to be the No. 1 priority.”