Museum Brass Hopes Grants, Fund Raising Erase Deficit

Officials at the Laguna Art Museum, still awaiting an annual financial audit, say they are not overly concerned with preliminary figures showing a $72,000 deficit for their fiscal year that ended Aug. 31.

The museum’s annual operating budget is $1.2 million.

“I’m very disappointed that the deficit is that big, and we have to turn that around,” Claudette Shaw, president of the museum’s board of trustees, said after an annual board meeting Tuesday. “But it’s not unique to our museum to fall behind.”

Besides, she said, last year’s preliminary budget figures do not include deferred income in the form of contribution pledges, which will help to ease the deficit in the new fiscal year that began Sept. 1. Coupled with new fund raising (see box), the deferred income could shave up to $35,000 off the deficit, trustee Ken Heintz said.

The 71-year-old museum also won grants for the current fiscal year that will help lighten the load, according to director Charles Desmarais. The grants include $14,000 from the California Arts Council and $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A decline in contributions from individuals and new expenses from several staff additions helped cause the deficit, Shaw said. In the last year, a new development director was hired and Desmarais came on, filling a slot that had been vacant since November, 1987. The museum is still without a chief curator.

“This year could be looked on as an investment in the future of the museum,” Desmarais said.

Juan Carrillo, deputy director of programs for the California Arts Council, said a $72,000 deficit for a museum with a $1.2-million operating budget is “not bad.” He also said that “it is getting harder and harder for arts organizations not to operate with a deficit.” The museum had a $19,000 deficit the year before last, before the recent hirings.

Also announced at Tuesday’s board meeting were five new trustees:

Donald Bendetti, president of D.L. Bendetti Co., a Newport Beach land development and design firm; Beverly Mitchell, a homemaker who has been a docent at the museum; Bruce Tester, a partner in the Irvine law firm of Pettis Tester Kruse & Krinsky; Woodward Dike, a principal in the Newport Beach landscape architecture firm of Dike-Runa Inc., and Joan B. Rehnborg, a longtime museum docent.