Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 12, 1994 TAG: 9401120270
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That's why, its director and board chairman say, the museum's executive committee has eyed taking over the Explore Park in Roanoke County and building a major branch of the museum there.
But those warnings of extinction are being challenged by the two state Cabinet secretaries who oversaw the museum's budget requests the past four years.
Finance Secretary Paul Timmreck and Conservation and Natural Resources Secretary Elizabeth Haskell say the museum never has been in danger of being closed.
So do members of the two General Assembly committees that deal with the budget.
But the museum director and the Roanoke Valley legislator most out front on the merger proposal still warn that the museum might become an endangered species in Gov.-elect George Allen's administration if Republicans are serious about their campaign call to restructure state government.
Is that really so?
Allen's not saying; his spokesman says, in effect, Allen has more important things on his mind as he prepares to take office this week.
The only clear thing in the controversy over the proposal to merge the museum and Explore is why Explore is so interested.
The living-history park re-creating life on the Appalachian frontier is in a well-documented financial bind. It wants to open a scaled-down version of the park in May. Yet Explore - which got $6 million in state funds to buy land in the late 1980s - never has received state funds for operating expenses.
Until now, the project (by law a state entity, albeit one that operates outside the regular state bureaucracy), has gotten by on private funds raised by the River Foundation, a nonprofit group of Roanoke business leaders. But that spigot of private funds will be turned off in June.
For Explore, a merger with a state agency - even a poor one - would be the equivalent of marrying into money.
And if Explore can get the museum to build a major tourist facility at the park in the process, Park Director Rupert Cutler says, that would jump-start Explore by giving it a centerpiece attraction. The museum's exhibits on prehistoric life, he says, would be a natural introduction to the park's re-enactments on what happened in the Blue Ridge once settlers arrived.
But is the museum really so strapped that the only way to survive, and make a stronger pitch for state funds in the future, is to take over Explore?
Museum Executive Director Connie Gendron contends that the museum is in a precarious situation, both financially and geographically. The museum attracts only 25,000 visitors a year in Martinsville. The museum's operating budget has been slashed 32 percent during Gov. Douglas Wilder's administration, to $1.8 million.
That's forced the museum board to all but give up on getting the proposed $16 million expansion it had hoped to build in Martinsville.
Indeed, if its budget is cut much more, Gendron claims, the museum would have no choice but to shut down within two to four years.
But now, instead of pushing to expand in Martinsville, the museum is eyeing a new branch at Explore - a move widely viewed in Martinsville as an attempt to "steal" that city's proposed expansion and perhaps the existing museum, as well.
Gendron has tried to make the case that Martinsville isn't really losing the proposed expansion, because the state never would have put a new facility there anyway, at least not in the next decade.
Perhaps, she says, if the state's financial situation improves, the state might still be persuaded someday to expand the museum's Martinsville facilities, no matter how many branches it has around the state. And she insists that the museum's headquarters and research facilities will stay in Martinsville.
But for now, she says, the only chance of getting more exhibit space is if it's put in a place with more tourists passing by - such as Explore's location on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Roanoke County. Only then, she says, will the museum's expansion generate enough revenue to warrant the approval of the General Assembly.
In part, Gendron blames Timmreck - Wilder's finance chief who will continue in that job under Allen.
"Secretary Haskell hoped to personally intervene so she could get the building in the budget," Gendron told a Martinsville economic development group last week, "but Secretary Timmreck has lobbied strongly against that building for two years and would not approve that building in Martinsville based on the fact that it would not pay off the debt service."
Furthermore, Gendron says, the existing museum has been in jeopardy of being cut entirely from the state budget, saying "we've been on the chopping block twice" and only Haskell's intervention saved it.
Nonsense, Haskell and Timmreck say. Actually, Timmreck describes Gendron's scenario as "laughable" and says it "doesn't square with reality."
"We never considered in the Wilder administration eliminating the museum," Timmreck says.
For one thing, Haskell points out, the museum is intended as a "museum without walls," with a headquarters in Martinsville but educational and scientific programs throughout the state. Those range from traveling exhibits in malls and schools to the the recent dig in a Pittsylvania County quarry that unearthed a rare plant fossil and the ongoing excavations in the Saltville salt lick that turned up the skull of a mammoth.
Therefore, Haskell says, the number of people who pass through the museum's doors in Martinsville isn't the only consideration in evaluating the agency's importance.
Instead, it's the estimated 700,000 people who see the museum's exhibits, wherever they are in Virginia.
Moreover, Timmreck says, he never opposed the museum's expansion on grounds that Martinsville wasn't a good tourist draw; he says he opposed all state building projects because the state couldn't afford them in tight times. Haskell adds that if the economy had been better, the museum expansion in Martinsville might well have been included in the state budget.
Gendron, asked about the secretaries' comments, declines a response. "Sometimes you get into a situation where it's `he said, I said,' and there's no way to verify either one, so I can't say any more."
However, Gendron and state Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, warn that the problem now is the Allen administration, with its vow to streamline state government.
"There will be a blue-ribbon strike force to look at state operations," Bell says. That group may question why the state is spending almost $2 million per year on a museum that draws so few visitors, Bell says.
Bell, however, zeroes in on the number Haskell says he shouldn't - the number of people viewing the museum's exhibits Martinsville.
"A museum's main role is to provide an opportunity for people to see exhibits," Bell says. "If only 25,000 people do that, is that a good investment for the state?"
by CNB