The award of a $350,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant to renovate the Haines Sheldon Museum’s climate control system has put a difficult question to the Haines Borough Assembly: Should members commit roughly $500,000 in borough funds and staff time, the match required to complete the project, or should they direct the museum’s board to return the grant?
The museum’s board of trustees put this question to assembly members at a meeting Tuesday. After hearing from trustee Sue Chasen and former museum director Helen Alten, who is currently running for assembly, the assembly voted to refer the decision to the Government Affairs and Services (GAS) Committee for further consideration.
“It seems like we’re getting told from two sides here that there’s two different things going on, so I know I need more time to decipher this,” assembly member Jerry Lapp said at the Tuesday meeting.
The question of keeping the grant is complicated by the fact that, according to the board of trustees and the assembly, they were unaware that Alten had applied for a grant that committed $500,000 in borough funds prior to receiving notification of the grant’s award.
“The former director never provided the grant application which included a budget and budget narrative for examination, review and approval to the board,” a letter from trustees included in the Sept. 22 assembly packet.
“The board has a fiduciary responsibility for the museum and they have not been included in important information related to budgets and commitments,” Chasen said in an interview with the CVN before the meeting.
Alten, who was abruptly fired on June 30 after the board eliminated her position, citing budget constraints, said she doesn’t remember whether she sought board input before she applied for the grant in January, but said the grant terms shouldn’t have been a surprise to the board and assembly.
There is documentation that Alten notified the board that the grant application had been submitted in a Feb. 3 museum director’s report.
“I also gave lists of grants that were still pending to the board twice, the last time on June 30,” Alten said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I think it’s just a matter of people not asking. I never got any comments. I never got any questions about it,” she said, adding that at the time she applied for the grant, she was having difficulty communicating with the board and several of the board’s meetings in late 2019 and early 2020 were cancelled.
Chasen, who wasn’t on the board at the time the grant was applied for, acknowledges that communication between Alten and the board had been challenging, but said this doesn’t excuse Alten.
“There was ineffective communication on both sides, but the key to successful nonprofits is a good relationship between the board and its director,” Chasen said.
Alten and the museum board also have different takes when it comes to their assessment of the project’s total cost.
In a Sept. 21 email to the assembly and museum trustees, Alten said she estimates the project will likely require a roughly $200,000 match from the borough, $300,000 less than the budget she submitted to NEH suggests.
Roughly $100,000 could be covered through donated borough staff time and roughly $200,000 in the project budget are “contingency funds that will probably not be used or needed,” Alten said. “The hard cash match needed is under $200,000. This can be provided by… allotments of $50,000 over the next four years.”
Chasen expressed doubt about these calculations. She said she thinks it would be irresponsible to move forward with the project without contingency funds and that donated borough staff time would still require assembly approval.
Public facilities director Ed Coffland said at present, there’s no funding for the project, which is what he said he told Alten prior to her submission of the application. It would be up to the assembly to determine the project is a priority and redirect capital funds to it, he said.
Assembly member Brenda Josephson, who sits on the GAS Committee, said she and the committee’s other members, Lapp and Gabe Thomas, will consider not only whether to keep the grant, but also whether Alten failed to adequately communicate and seek board and assembly input when she applied for the money.
“It was an unbelievable issue of process failure and transparency,” Josephson said in an interview after Tuesday’s meeting. “We have a grant application that went to the federal government making statements that weren’t accurate… It encumbered the borough to half a million dollars, and there isn’t half a million set aside. We need to discuss one, the failure of public process and two, what we are going to do moving forward.”
Alten disagrees with this characterization.
In an email after the Tuesday meeting, Alten said, “I am concerned that Brenda insisted on the GAS Committee overseeing this so she can focus on the ‘gotcha’ element that Sue Chasen emphasized, rather than the real need of the facility and the blessing of this gift.”
Despite the many areas where Alten’s and the board’s accounts differ, there is consensus that the museum’s climate control, or HVAC, system is in need of replacement.
“The HVAC system is an area of concern. I would say, ‘It’s in its last days.’ The humidifying part of it doesn’t work very well. It breaks down all the time. There’s really no question that it needs to be replaced,” Coffland said. His department is able to keep it functioning, but it requires an ever-increasing investment in staff time and parts, he said.
An effective climate control system is central to the museum’s mission of preserving its collection, as well as its ability to borrow from other collections, according to Alten. “For grants, climate control is very big, no one will loan things to you if your facility’s not climate controlled,” she said.
According to the NEH website, the museum has up to five years to use the grant.
The GAS Committee will meet on Oct. 12. If time allows, the committee will discuss the NEH grant then. If not, the committee will take up the issue at a meeting in November.