City priorities: Another sad tale at the city museum

The front desk at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. (Laurie Craig / Juneau Independent)

By Ron Heintz

Last year voters in Juneau elected to cut revenue for the city and borough’s government out of frustration with how the city manages its budget.

Two recent letters to the Independent highlighted this frustration. Part of this frustration grew out of the way in which the city prioritizes spending. The decision by the Assembly to terminate half of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum staff and endanger the viability of the museum serves as an example of the haphazard way the city sets priorities.

Closure of the museum raises significant financial and ethical questions about the city's responsibilities relative to the safety and deaccession of the collection, which is held as a public trust. It is unlikely that the voters had layoffs and closure of the museum in mind when they reduced the city’s revenue, but terminating staff and wrecking a local institution is what they got.  

The haphazard priorities the Assembly applied to the museum are evident when you consider that the Assembly opted to cut the management of the museum based on the assurance from the deputy manager that it would remain open. Previous city managers and Assemblies have recognized that the museum requires a dedicated management team, decapitating the museum’s staff and expecting it to remain open was, at best, wishful thinking.

Terminating a director who writes grants to bring in funding and a curator that creates programs to generate receipts is inconsistent with the goal of keeping the museum open. The Assembly’s decisions have now motivated the curator of the collection to quit and the only remaining staff member is a part-time administrative assistant. Who is the city expecting to support local arts and tell our story?

The city claims they are recruiting a new curator for the collection, but the current state of the museum will make recruiting a qualified replacement nearly impossible. In a recent interview on KTOO, the library director who oversees the museum admitted that a month after voting for this budget there is still no plan for how the museum plans to fulfill its mission. 

The sad part is that all of this was completely avoidable. First, the library could have reapportioned its labor budget to protect one, or both, of the lost positions. The library was in the process of hiring two part-time positions at the same time they anticipated the two museum terminations. Moreover, the library was aware of a pending retirement at the end of the fiscal year. Clearly, retaining museum management was not a priority for the Library Department even though it appears that funds could have been found in their budget.

Second, the city could have transferred funds from the Youth Activity Grant Program to the museum. This program, housed in the Parks and Recreation Department, offers $350,000 in grants to supplement youth organizations throughout the city. The grants cannot be used to support the operations of these groups; instead the grants are intended to enhance and supplement those organizations’ activities. Transferring the funds needed to support the two museum positions would have had no effect on the operating budgets of these youth groups and would have left nearly $100,000 to supplement them in FY27.

Setting budget priorities is hard work and even harder when your funds have been reduced. But doing the same with less is how governments have been asked to function for as long as there have been governments. Sometimes hard choices must be made. However, when a government prioritizes elimination of a valued institution and terminating careers it should do so in a rational and transparent way. Arbitrarily terminating the museum’s leadership and letting the rest of the institution wither on the vine is neither. 

• Ron Heintz is a Tee Harbor resident. His wife, Bonita Nelson, is president of the Friends of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.