State Probing Donor Limits on Laguna Museum Works

The state attorney general’s office is exploring whether any donations or gifts to the Laguna Art Museum, which plans to merge with the Newport Harbor Art Museum, came with restrictions prohibiting their use outside the city.

Although the merger agreement provides for a satellite museum at the present museum site, the Orange County Museum of Art would be based in Newport Beach, in the present Newport Harbor museum building.

Vern Spitaleri, president of Motivated Museum Members, which is fighting the merger, said, “There are many people who are coming forward with declarations that, to their personal knowledge, they or their grandmothers or fathers gave X dollars or X artwork with every intent that it was to serve the Laguna Art Museum here in Laguna Beach.”

But Laguna museum attorney Ellen R. Marshall said Thursday that the museum’s bylaws and articles of incorporation are “silent” on the museum’s geographic reach, except to refer to Orange County as the museum’s principle place of business.

Staff members reviewing the museum’s various mission statements written since its founding in 1918, as well as newsletters dating back to the 1920s, have so far found “absolutely nothing that deals with geographic intent,” Marshall said.

Marshall said she will conduct a complete review of the donation records, but so far none of the few that contain restrictions have been found to address the geographic issue.

She also will send documents to Deputy Atty. Gen. Jim Cordi’s office, which is conducting a routine review of the merger, showing that the museum’s outreach programs for children have extended to both ends of the county, she said.

Although the only way the attorney general could stop the merger would be to file suit in Superior Court on specific grounds, “nobody is going to do something if the attorney general is not happy with it,” Marshall said.

Cordi said Wednesday that trustees of both museums have agreed not to close the merger until any legal questions about it have been resolved.