Hansen Dam museum mess a preview of troubled future for San Gabriel River Discovery Center?

The LA Times, Daily News and La Opinion are all reporting the impending Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation of the Children's Museum of Los Angeles (pictured above), a project a decade and tens of millions of dollars in the making.

The long road to failure for the Children’s Museum—and the similar path being followed by the Metropolitan Water District's Center for Water Education in Hemet, Calif.—should serve as cautionary tales for the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority.

According to the Daily News, the board of directors of the Hansen Dam-located Children’s Museum “has accepted the recommendation of its attorneys to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy—liquidation—conceding the impossibility of raising enough money to repay loans and operate the museum.”

The museum had been banking on $10 million pledged by businessman Bruce F. Friedman to help reach the $58.5 million needed to open, but last month the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Friedman for securities fraud and froze his company’s assets.

The Center for Water Education has avoided such sensational, headline-grabbing blows to its finances, but it’s had its own serious setbacks.

In 2007, MWD cancelled the lease on the $26-million project ($16 million coming from the water bills of MWD customers) and even had to kick in nearly $5 million more simply to cover debt on the museum. Today, the water ed center is closed, there's no mention of it on MWD's education Web page, and its fate is up in the air.

The Children’s Museum has a $22-million gap it needs to bridge if it wants to continue in existence—but the move toward bankruptcy shows that’s probably a bridge too far.

And, by the way, $22 million is just a bit more than the Discovery Center Authority needs to raise simply to get its museum built. Finding money for maintenance, salaries and programming is an entirely different obstacle the DCA will need to overcome.

What’s going to happen to the 57,000-square-foot Children’s Museum? That’s up in the air. City Councilman Richard Alarcon said Los Angeles might end up owning the building—appropriate since it was city tax dollars that largely paid for its construction—and it might become an educational center of some sort.

But that’s not what taxpayers paid for, is it? And with the poor economy and the difficult path these projects follow, Southern California might end up with a trifecta of buildings that are nature-oriented only in so far as they form albatrosses around the necks of taxpayers.

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NOTE: Read more about the Children's Museum in tardigrade's June 9, 2008 post "It's always something isn't it?" at the Bug's Eyes blog.