Discovery Center long-term funding is an ‘issue,’ says authority Executive Officer Belinda Faustinos

Eight months after a government agency dominated by unelected water executives and public employees gave its approval for a controversial publicly funded $22 million water museum, the same agency appears to have no firm idea of the project’s long-term operations and maintenance costs. Nor has the agency been able to secure funding commitments to pay the long-term costs.

At a meeting of the authority board of directors in June, the agency’s executive officer, Belinda V. Faustinos, conceded that long-term funding was an “issue.”

In January, the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority approved the water museum and meeting hall proposed for the Whittier Narrows wildlife sanctuary between the Montebello and Puente hills. Yet in April, the LA Weekly reported that the authority, in addition to being short of needed construction funds, “does not even have an updated estimate of future operating costs.”

At a meeting of the authority board of directors in June, the agency’s executive officer, Belinda V. Faustinos, conceded that long-term funding was an “issue.” She said that costs beyond what the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation pays for its existing Whittier Narrows Nature Center and what two authority-member water districts pay for their current education programs would likely be a minimum of $200,000 annually, “if not more.”

It appears that officials prefer to dedicate meeting time, as they have recently, to selecting logos and letterhead and coming up with a design for a facility they can’t afford to build and probably can't afford to operate or maintain.

A document from the same June meeting shows that the authority had failed to secure commitments for long-term funding even by that point. Board agendas from a second June meeting, the authority’s July meeting and its August meeting show no attempts by the authority to address the critical matters of the project’s long-term costs and funding.

Long-term costs and the ability or willingness of organizations to pay those costs are at the heart of the viability question for such projects. “What comes to me is that it’s easy to build something [but] it’s hard to sustain the operation,” Michael Feeney, of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, told the LA Weekly, reflecting on the county’s troubled Watershed Resource Center.

“Everyone was excited to build it and there was a lot of enthusiasm at first,” he said. But, writes LA Weekly journalist Tibby Rothman, “the officials at the various agencies grew reluctant to devote the funds needed to keep it going. According to Feeney, the resource center is largely shuttered now, though not only for financial reasons.”

Similar problems contributed to the failure of the multimillion-dollar Children’s Museum of Los Angeles and to the troubles of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s big-ticket Center for Water Education in Hemet — today a costly white elephant for MWD ratepayers.

But rather than address the serious problems that plague the Discovery Center project, it appears that officials prefer to dedicate meeting time, as they have recently, to selecting logos and letterhead and coming up with a design for a facility they can’t afford to build and probably can't afford to operate or maintain.

Wave newspaper gets it: discovery center’s environmental impacts aren’t its only costs

With the expected release later this month of the draft environmental impact report on the San Gabriel River Discovery Center, it makes sense that focus would naturally gravitate toward the project’s serious environmental flaws.

A project that would destroy some of the most accessible acres of the Natural Area, the discovery center would be 15 times bigger than the current nature center. It would more than triple the size of the current 40-car parking. And it would build an artificial wetland only a five-minute walk from the real San Gabriel River—a truly odd component, considering the project takes its name from the river.

But the environmental costs aren't the only costs, and people are starting to talk about the grave financial and social impacts the discovery center would have on the surrounding communities.

Los Angeles Times journalist Louis Sahagun started the conversation in the media with his recent Greenspace blog post. And this article in the LA Wave newspaper continues that conversation.

As Jim Odling, chair of the Friends of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area, explains in the article, the Discovery Center Authority is taking a huge risk with taxpayer and ratepayer dollars—the only dollars the project’s been able to attract in nearly 10 years of work—at the worst possible time.

With the recent tax increases and with more tax and water rate increases on the way, the DCA is risking a lot of our money on an oversized science museum recent history shows might never open its doors.

Just look at the failed Children’s Museum of Los Angeles and the failed Center for Water Education if you want a frightening vision of what’s in store for the Natural Area if the discovery center gets built.

In some ways, construction is the easy part. The real test comes when the yet-to-be-created nonprofit that's supposed to run the place tries to raise enough money to pay for maintenance, staffing and programming costs on an 18,230-square-foot LEED platinum building. (A platinum LEED rating might mean a “green” building, but it definitely means another kind of green: dollars spent to cover expenses.)

But none of this even begins to touch on another severe impact of the project: the social costs of replacing access to nature with an unnecessary, money-sucking project that has grown ever larger because, as the county Sanitation Districts’ Sam Pedroza said, “more and more agencies want to make sure their stories are told there.”

Clearly, community needs are taking a back seat to ambition.

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.