Reduce, but don’t eliminate, funding for State Museum

WHO COULD EVER oppose the idea of a state museum?

A museum is a repository and a showplace of historic treasures, a place where we define who we are as a state and people and how we came to be that. It is a transmitter of our cultural values, a place where words in a textbook come to life before our children’s eyes.

Considered on its own, there is every reason in the world to fully support — and fund — a state museum.

But the State Museum — like every other thing the government spends money on — cannot be considered on its own. It must be considered in the context of everything else the government spends money on. All of those things must be prioritized, and when money is tight, difficult decisions must be made about expenditures that are not top priorities. When you stack the State Museum up against putting teachers in the classroom and guards in our prisons and Highway Patrol troopers on our roads and providing basic medical care for the poor, it doesn’t rank very high.

As painful as it is to contemplate, in this context, Gov. Mark Sanford’s idea of drastically reducing funding to the state museum makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense — at least not now — is cutting off state funding entirely, as Mr. Sanford proposes to do over the next three years.

Our state covers more of the museum’s budget than most states do. According to the American Museum Association, government-owned museums nationally receive an average of 63 percent of their funding from government. Our museum receives 79 percent of its $5.7 million budget — $4.5 million — from the state. Under Mr. Sanford’s proposal, state support would drop to 53 percent, or $3 million, next year.

Mr. Sanford says he believes the museum can raise enough money to survive. He might be right, particularly since the museum’s mortgage will be paid off in 2007, cutting its rental cost from the state from $3 million a year at least to $2.5 million, and probably less.

But there are no guarantees that there is enough private support in our state to replace the rest of the money. And it’s not at all clear that full private funding is something we should pursue. American Museum Association President Ed Able says that while some governments have tried this, they have always reversed themselves — but only after the staff was decimated, the programs degraded, the infrastructure undermined.

One problem is that when governments demand that museums support themselves financially, they insist on still appointing their boards and otherwise maintaining control. That makes finding major benefactors difficult.

On the other hand, some governments have succeeded in completely privatizing museums — which would mean handing over control of the museum to some private entity, rather than allowing the government to control what it does not fund.

We’re not convinced at this point that handing over the State Museum to a private entity would be a good move. Nor do we know that it is possible. Better at this point to cut back the funding for a year and see how much private funding the museum is able to generate. A year or two from now, when we know what is feasible, we will have a better idea of what our real options are and be in a better position to have an informed debate about whether, and how much, taxpayers should continue to support the museum.