A Lexus for Museum Director, Despite Layoffs : Arts: L.A. County Museum of Natural History Foundation purchases $49,000 car weeks before cutbacks are announced.

A foundation that provides about one-fourth of the money used to support the financially strapped Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History has bought a $49,000 Japanese luxury sedan for the museum’s director and his wife.

The top-of-the-line 1990 Lexus LS 400, part of a small fleet of automobiles assigned to top museum executives, was purchased last Oct. 30--just weeks before museum officials acknowledged a significant decline in contributions and began layoffs of a dozen or more middle- and lower-level employees.

Museum staffers and others are questioning the propriety of a top executive acquiring such a visible and extravagant fringe benefit at a time of staff reductions, tight budgets and program cutbacks.

“The people who are gone are the working people of the museum,” said one staff member who asked not to be identified. “You have to lay off a lot of those just to make one large executive salary or the prices of the luxury cars the executives drive. That’s really unfortunate.”

Director Craig Black and a small number of other top museum officials have a dual compensation arrangement with the county and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation. A spokesman for County Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon said that, because the auto was purchased with private foundation funds, the perk did not appear to run afoul of county financial regulations.

But a spokesman for Supervisor Ed Edelman expressed concern about the circumstances of the car purchase and its proximity to the series of layoffs at the museum. “The museum foundation is a private support group the county doesn’t have any control over,” the spokesman said, but Edelman is “still concerned and will be looking at it when the (museum) budget comes up for hearings.”

The spokesman said the issue might arise as early as today at the Board of Supervisors’ first scheduled public hearing on the proposed $11.1-billion county budget.

Black, who has been director of the museum since 1982, says he needs the Lexus to perform his duties as a museum fund-raiser.

“I’m certain everyone is going to have his own opinion (about the Lexus purchase),” Black said. “It’s a very, very nice car. So much of (success in fund-raising) is perception. The people one deals with when you’re raising money are those that have money.”

Black’s Lexus, museum officials say, is part of his unwritten “compensation package.” He also receives a salary from the foundation and the county totaling about $160,000 a year, lives in a $875,000 foundation-owned mansion in Los Angeles’ exclusive Hancock Park neighborhood and also drives a county-owned 1988 Buick.

Museum staffers say Black usually drives the Buick between his home and the museum, leaving the Lexus at home for daytime use by his wife, Elizabeth King. Black said King’s use of the car is related to foundation fund-raising activities.

Department of Motor Vehicles records in Sacramento indicate the dealer who sold the Lexus reported its purchase price was $45,343. Internal financial records obtained by The Times show the foundation paid $49,236 from an account usually earmarked for scientific and exhibition equipment.

The Lexus was purchased to replace a 1988 Lincoln Continental, which was sold for $20,000.

Black said the museum foundation has also supplied vehicles to “four or five” other top foundation-paid museum employees, including at least one other luxury make--a late-model British-built Sterling sedan--for the deputy director for administration and operations. Museum and staff sources said the executive motor pool also includes a turbo-charged 1989 Ford Thunderbird coupe and a 1989 Chevrolet sedan.

The proposed county portion of the budget for the natural history museum for fiscal 1992 is $12,860,000--up just $22,000 from last year. The increase is far less than the rate of inflation and will force cuts and layoffs in a range of museum programs, museum officials said. The Board of Supervisors is considering a cut in the museum’s 171-person work force to 158 posts. Exhibitions and educational programs would be eliminated.

Seven weeks after the foundation bought the luxury car with money from its general operating fund, employees were warned that deteriorating economic conditions at the museum would necessitate a major series of layoffs.

Figures provided by the museum administration and sources on the museum staff differ, but between the time the car was purchased and the end of April, the museum foundation laid off or fired between 12 and 17 employees.

“The action was taken when it became apparent in January, 1991 that due to the economic climate, revenues had declined in the areas of corporate underwriting and individual memberships,” the museum said in a statement last week.