Jim Richerson, President and CEO of Lakeview and Project Leader for Museum Square, gave a presentation to the City Council at last night’s meeting formally requesting a one-year extension of time on their agreement with the city a smaller-sized museum.
The reason for the extension is because fundraising efforts have not gone as planned, and now they’re putting a lot of their hope for funding in the New Market Tax Credit program. However, they won’t hear whether they’re approved for that funding until October, which is after one of their contract deadlines.
The size change is because construction costs have escalated significantly. Richerson said when they started this project, they were projecting construction costs rising at a rate of 4% annually based on historical data. What they’ve found is that costs are actually rising at a rate of 2-4% quarterly instead. They’ve decided to stay within their $65 million overall budget and instead reduce the size of the building.
However, Richerson went to great lengths to show that this reduction only minimally impacts the programming of the museum itself. He points out that while the total square footage is being reduced from 96,562 to 80,784 square feet (15,778, or 16%), the usable space is only being reduced from 64,400 to 57,955 square feet (6,445, or 10%). Auxiliary space (which includes offices, classrooms, store, lobby, support areas, etc.) is being cut from 32,162 to 22,829 square feet (9,333, or 29%).
It was also pointed out that when you look at the block as a whole — that is, including Caterpillar’s visitor center and their monetary commitment — you’re looking at a $130 million project that is 63% funded. From Lakeview’s standpoint, this “puts things in perspective.” However, the reality is that only 37% of the museum’s funding has been raised ($24.5 million out of $65 million), and Caterpillar’s contribution is contingent on the museum officials raising their funds.
The council received the report and then immediately started debating when it would vote on the issue. The original motion was to vote on it at the July 24 meeting, but Councilman Sandberg is going to be out of town. Normally just having one councilman be out of town would not necessarily be sufficient reason to delay a vote, but Gary’s been very involved in this issue and essentially asked for the courtesy of a deferral. After much wrangling, the council decided to discuss it at their August 14 meeting. That’s in five weeks.
Setting aside ones opinion about the museum itself, I think the debate on when to have the debate illustrated how quickly it became obvious that the new twice-a-month meeting schedule will cause problems.
I agree, Billy. If you have to defer something two meetings, you’re talking about 4-5 weeks. That’s rather ridiculous. They almost called a special meeting, but then that ran into scheduling conflicts with other council members. If they were under the old schedule, a decision could have been made next Tuesday, July 17 — a full four weeks sooner.
Hey, did you get a look at that snazzy $2,600 glorified egg timer?
The reduction of the so-called “auxiliary space.” Is where my beef really starts. As I have said many times before, Peoria’s irreplaceable material culture [artifacts] and written history is at great risk. Conserve and preserve should be the #1 goal of ANY museum. Richerson is full of crap. The plans for how/where to store artifacts has barely [if at all] been discussed. Off-site storage, out source artifact work, etc? Expensive as hell. Where will Lakeview get money for this? Acquisitions? Maybe someone will donate another duck collection. Is anyone getting digitals of Rock, Paper, Scissor free-for-all?
What will reduction in auxiliary space really effect?