Bowers Museum Warns City of Dramatic Cuts

The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art faces “serious financial difficulties” and could suffer dramatic cutbacks in its operations and staffing if the city of Santa Ana continues to reduce its subsidies, its executive director said in a letter to the city manager.

The Feb. 3 letter from museum director Peter Keller to City Manager David N. Ream comes just a year after the city started weaning the museum from $1.5 million a year in city funds, which accounts for nearly a third of its budget. The museum was supposed to receive 10% fewer funds each year, until the subsidy ended in 2007.

Keller warned that without the money, the museum’s staff would have to be cut “substantially,” and many departments, including research and collections, membership, and public relations, would be eliminated. Other areas such as security, maintenance and accounting would be slashed.

Special exhibits “of any national importance” would be all but ended, and the Kidseum, its children’s museum, would be closed.

Keller asked Ream “for your assistance in deferring” the annual cutbacks for at least five years.

Ream said Tuesday he had not seen the letter. Cindy Nelson, executive director of community development and the city’s liaison to the Bowers Museum, said she found the request “not unreasonable” but said it is up to the Santa Ana City Council to decide the matter next month.

Neither Keller nor lawyer Lowell Martindale, chairman of the museum’s Board of Governors, returned phone calls Tuesday.

The letter documents severe financial problems that began last year, when the city’s subsidy was cut for the first time and a five-year capital fund-raising campaign ended. Between the two cutbacks, the museum has lost $510,000 a year that it once relied on to operate.

“We have found that the demands of raising these additional funds, in addition to the approximately $166,000 we must earn or raise each month, is beyond our current abilities,” Keller wrote.

Nearly all museum officials are constantly on the prowl for funds, since admissions, food and store sales and facility rentals don’t cover the costs of running the institution. In general, museums rely on donations or grants for at least half their budgets.

“There isn’t a nonprofit in this state that doesn’t have problems with money, with one exception, and that’s the Getty,” said Karen Johnson, president of the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, which opened in December. “There’s never enough money to do what you need to do.”

The Bowers Museum raised concerns of financial problems when it boosted its admission prices substantially this month and eliminated its Thursday evening hours.

In December, Keller turned over the day-to-day running of the museum to other administrators so he could spend his time filling the 13 vacancies on the 30-member board of governors.

Bowers officials in the past have come up with a plan to take the museum private, saying that fund-raising would be easier in Orange County, where donors are reluctant to give money to government-funded museums.

The city and the museum signed an agreement in 1987 to make Bowers gradually less dependent on city funding, and a nonprofit board was set up to run the facility. Since then, the museum has received more than $13 million in city subsidies for operations. Santa Ana also spent another $12 million on a major museum expansion completed in 1992. The city owns 40% of the art collection.

Councilman Ted R. Moreno, who fought the privatization of the Bowers, said museum administrators will have to justify the funding request.

“In an ideal world, you assume people abide by a contract they sign,” he said. “It looks like they’re trying to renege.”

In his letter, Keller said the Bowers has outgrown itself.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to envision the Bowers as we now know it operating on the originally planned $1.5-million budget,” Keller said. “If, however, we continue to lose city support, we will have little option than to very quickly return the museum to the level of the 1980s.”