SITKA, ALASKA The $25,000 approved Thursday night is added on to a $95,000 budget item for the Historical Society, so all told, the city is sending $120,000 to the society and its museum.
The Society has asked for that amount for the last four years. Last year, the Society received $102,000 in bits and pieces throughout the year. Society executive director Bob Medinger says the funding request is essential to the future of the museum.
“The base funding from the Assembly keeps our core professional staff,” Medinger said. “We’re praying we have a good year with the shop and our door income but we absolutely, the board and myself personally, we’re working on a serious fund development effort and plan for philanthropic giving in this town to help us long term. So we are doing everything in our power to stay stable, have enough in reserve so we’re not struggling from year to year. Our curator is our number one position to keep a professional museum going.”
The money approved on Thursday was taken from a larger pot of cash that’s annually given to various nonprofit organizations in Sitka. That funding has been questioned during the Assembly’s budget debates.
Assembly member Larry Crews, who initiated the fund move, says nonprofits serve an important role in Sitka, but that the historical society – itself an independent nonprofit – is an integral part of the city.
“We have priorities of how we fund,” Crews said. “We’ve got police, fire and roads, and then education. And I think museums should fall into that category and then it should be going into the nonprofits.”
Assembly member Phyllis Hackett said at the first budget meeting in late April that she would fight efforts to take money away from the nonprofit pool.
“It just leaves me dumbfounded when I hear not funding the nonprofits,” she said Thursday.
Hackett reiterated that Sitka’s nonprofits serve the city’s under-served populations, and that the amount of money the city distributes to those groups is then used to attract larger grants from out of town.
“A lot of those grants, and a large percentage of those grants, are not available if you cannot show community support,” Hackett said. “If you cannot show that the city realizes your value, then you’re not going to be here, and I’m just wondering who you think is supposed to take care of the people who are less fortunate than us, and there’s a lot of them out there, and it’s kind of amazing how many there are.”
Hackett says she’s a supporter of Sitka’s history and that she’d support moving the money from somewhere else, but not from nonprofits.
“I support the nonprofits. I do it with my own paycheck and a lot of people in this community do,” said Mayor Cheryl Westover, who says the overall point of the pool of money isn’t harmed by shrinking the size of the pool. “I don’t think we need to keep upping the amount. I think we just need to show support. And there are some we need to show more support because if they weren’t there, then we’d need to do the program.”
Efforts were made to postpone the vote, or to direct the administrator to find the Historical Society’s $25,000 from a different source. But those efforts failed, and in the end, the Assembly voted 4 to 1 to move the money, with Hackett voting no, and Mim McConnell recusing herself. The Historical Society is a client of her publishing business.
The total $51 million dollar city budget must still go through two readings at the Assembly table, where it can be changed, before becoming final.
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