Task Force to Museum: Please Don’t Move : Debate: Citing cultural and historic ties, a coalition is trying to persuade the museum to remain on the site where it was founded by Charles Lummis in 1914.

A task force of three city agencies and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission would study ways to persuade the historic Southwest Museum in Mt. Washington to abandon plans to relocate under a proposal by City Councilman Richard Alatorre.

An Alatorre spokeswoman said the council motion is now expected to come up for debate in early January. It is the latest development in a quietly-unfolding, community-based attempt to talk the museum out of leaving the Mt. Washington site it has occupied since 1914.

“The Southwest Museum is a genuine treasure for all Angelenos and it’s a special cultural and historic anchor for those of us who live nearby,” Alatorre said in a prepared statement. “It would be highly ironic and a real loss if the museum were to move.”

The initiative to try to keep the museum where it is has been organized by Save Our Southwest (SOS), an ad hoc coalition of community groups in the Mt. Washington and Highland Park areas.

At the museum, meanwhile, officials said the Southwest’s board of directors considered several very preliminary proposals for new sites for the museum at a recent board meeting. But Jerome Selmer, the museum’s director, said the museum has received no firm relocation offers since The Times disclosed last month that the museum’s board had decided to seek a new location and dispose of the 12.5-acre Mt. Washington site that is the home of the museum originally built by Charles Lummis.

The museum has cited traffic congestion, lack of parking and the existence of $2 million in deferred maintenance needs--including some repairs related to seismic safety--as its principal motivations to relocate. However, community groups have charged that the museum’s board is uneasy with the naturally ethnically mixed neighborhood that surrounds the museum, which includes large numbers of Anglos, Latinos, blacks and Asian immigrants.

Selmer said the museum’s long-range planning committee has not scheduled any additional meetings to discuss the relocation question. He declined to give details of any of the alleged inquiries.

However, both Selmer and Joanne D. Hale, executive director of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park, have both denied the existence of discussions of any kind--informal or otherwise--of a merger or partnership between those two facilities.

The Southwest-Autry combination has emerged repeatedly over the last several months as a subject of speculation about the future course of the Southwest Museum. The Southwest has already provided a number of items from its famed collection of American Indian artifacts to the Autry on a loan basis and some Los Angeles museum observers have long felt the two institutions might make a natural fit.

James F. Dickason, president of the Southwest Museum, pointedly denied the possibility of a deal with the Autry at the time the Southwest’s desire to move was first disclosed. “They’re cowboys and we’re Indians,” said Dickason, “and the two don’t get along.”

An Alatorre spokeswoman said the councilman would ask for creation of an inter-agency task force to study the Southwest Museum situation that would try to identify steps public agencies could take to alleviate problems of access and parking.

The county transportation commission, for instance, the spokeswoman said, will be asked to consider selecting a site near the museum for the Highland Park station of a proposed Los Angeles-Pasadena light rail line due to begin construction in 1993. The line will run on what is now Santa Fe Railway right-of-way that runs adjacent to the museum property.

Alatorre’s office said the city departments of public works, transportation and planning would also be involved in the task force whose creation Alatorre has proposed. The task force would be directed to report its findings within 60 days after the unit was established.

“The museum has variously cited each of these problems (the adequacy of streets, parking and transportation access) as the reason for the move,” said an Alatorre spokeswoman. She said the task force would be asked to study, among other things, the possibility for the museum to receive favorable financial treatment in development agreements that may come into being along the light rail line. The museum has extensive property holdings on both sides of the light rail right of way as it passes through Highland Park just at the Mt. Washington boundary.