This article fisrt appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 26, 2012 - In an effort to restore public confidence after a spate of bad publicity, the board of the Missouri History Museum shortened the contract of director Robert Archibald to one year.
Archibald's base salary remains the same, at $375,000. But any payout for his unused vacation days, valued at $580,000, would now come from private sources, not the tax dollars the museum receives as part of the Zoo-Museum District.
The moves came after the museum's board voted unanimously Friday morning for significant changes that will give more authority to commissioners from the Zoo-Museum District.
Previously, Archibald had a three-year contract that was set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013. The museum said the shorter pact would allow the planned changes in governance to take effect more quickly and let its fund-raising campaign proceed under Archibald's leadership.
Public concerns over Archibald's compensation prompted the compensation committee of the board to go into closed session after its public meeting Friday morning. Details of his new contract were released later in the day.
Under the new governance procedures -- which will be voted on by the subdistrict board this coming week -- while the museum board will retain responsibility for day-to-day operations, newly formed joint committees will oversee the museum’s budget and how much its top executives are paid. The committees will have members from the museum board of trustees and the board of the Museum Subdistrict of the Zoo Museum District --
Ray Stranghoener, the head of the museum board, characterized the changes as moving the responsibility for governance from 80-20 in favor of the museum board to 50-50 sharing with the subdistrict board.
The changes, he said, are “significant and substantive” and not the result of “arm twisting or public pressure.” Instead, he said, they are designed to help turn a negative environment that has arisen around the museum in recent weeks into a positive movement to restore public confidence and to focus on the museum's contributions to the community.
He said the changes are an answer to a basic question: How can the museum avoid misunderstandings about policies and procedures and make its relationship with the subdistrict board work more smoothly?
The result, Stranghoener said, will be “more of a real partnership.”
Specifically, the changes would:
- Create a joint budget committee with an equal number of members from the museum board and the subdistrict board, to oversee, review and approve the museum’s annual budget.
- Create a similar joint committee for executive compensation. Each year, a nationally recognized consultant on executive compensation would be retained to help set salaries.
- Require the subdistrict's approval of any unbudgeted expenditure of more than $300,000.
- Require that all real estate purchases be approved by the subdistrict whether or not public money is involved.
- Make sure that the subdistrict board receives a copy of the annual detailed audit report by the museum’s independent auditor.
- Provide the subdistrict with regular reports of attendance at traveling exhibits, regular admissions and online visits.
- Reaffirm that the board and the staff of the museum control its day-to-day operations.
The new agreement will be reviewed each December, with a committee of the subdistrict responsible for recommending possible changes. If disagreements arise that cannot be resolved during a six-month negotiating period, the agreement would terminate and tax revenue – currently $10 million a year – would end as of the end of the following year.
The museum’s budget has been one topic that has raised public concern as details have become known about its purchase of property on Delmar that was designated for a community center but never developed. Compensation for museum head Robert Archibald also has drawn criticism. Reporting by the Post-Dispatch has brought much of that information to light.
Stranghoener said that there has been a general “misconception that the subdistrict occasionally sends us a big check and we decide how to spend it.” He said that expenditures by the museum are approved on several levels, adding:
“There’s no question that dollars are fungible, but we have a very good record of the spending of public funds.”
A different relationship
He noted that the relationship of the history museum and the Missouri Botanical Garden with the Zoo-Museum District is different from that of the other institutions in the district – the Zoo, the Art Museum and the Science Center. The history museum and garden existed as private organizations for many years before joining the district in the 1980s.
Now, Stranghoener said, “we’re going to be working more closely than ever before with our partners in the subdistrict…. It’s going to take cooperation and collaboration for this to work successfully.”
The changes approved by the museum board Friday were negotiated over the past week by former Sen. John C. Danforth and were still in draft form when presented to the board – so much so that at first, there were no printed copies. After some board members said they wanted to have something in front of them before voting, the meeting took a break while copies could be printed and distributed.
Danforth did not attend the meeting, but in an interview with the Beacon Thursday he said the purpose of the changes was to clarify a relationship that had been murky in places.
“There was a strong feeling on the part of a lot of people that the trustees of the museum were making all the decisions,” he said, “and there was not sufficient transparency and sufficient input and control by the public representatives, the commissioners, over the spending of public funds.
“What you have is a partnership, and one of the partners is in the private sector. The private sector partner owns the artifacts and owns what is valuable in the library and raises a lot of the money. The other partner is taxpayers, so you have to try to work out a new agreement that creates a true public-private partnership. That is what happened over the past week.”
Danforth said he was not asked to make judgments about the purchase of the Delmar property or compensation for Archibald, two topics that have prompted the most discussion in recent weeks.
“It’s important to represent the interests of taxpayers and have them protected,” he said, “but it’s also important to understand tht the History Museum is a private institution and has been since the middle of the 19th century. It owns its artifacts and it is its own private entity. This is really kind of a broad question about these public-private partnerships: What is proper oversight and what is encroachment?”
As far as Archibald’s leadership, Danforth said:
“If you would talk to people at the museum, particularly in light of the capital fund drive that they are in the early stages of conducting, they would view him as an irreplaceable asset. I know he has his detractors, but he also has his very strong advocates in the community and on the board of the museum.”
Support and criticism for Archibald
That support was clearly evident during the brief discussion of the proposed changes to the contract between the museum and the subdistrict.
Museum board member Sandra Moore called her colleagues to state their support for Archibald, who has come under fire for the purchase of property on Delmar that was designated for a community center but never developed.
“We need to publicly say that we don’t have a problem with the way that Bob Archibald is running this institution.” Moore said. Her remarks brought applause from board members who were meeting at the museum.
But that view was not shared in a draft report prepared by members of the audit committee of the Zoo-Museum District board. It noted that Archibald’s compensation for 2011 included a base salary of $368,700, housing allowance of $33,000, car allowance of $12,000, and other compensation that brought the total to $503,087. Payment for unused vacation days was calculated at $571,483 as of the end of last year.
“The benefits appear out of line for a nonprofit organization that is dependent for over 70 percent of its revenue from public money,” their report said.
They also called for the present contract with Archibald, executed this year but not effective until next year, to be withdrawn.
As far as the property on Delmar, which was bought in 2006 for $875,000 from former Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. and his partner, it said the transaction involved a conflict of interest and the purchase “was reckless and not in the public interest.” Bosley was a member of the museum board from 1999 to November 2005.
More generally, the committee called the museum’s board “too large and unwieldy to properly govern” museum operations and called for changes in its contract with the subdistrict.
Public perception of the museum was an undercurrent throughout Friday morning’s board meeting. Past board president Frank Jacobs summed up the issue this way:
“We are doing this under pressure, and the pressure from the media is not going to stop no matter what we do.”
In response to a request for more time to consider the changes, Stranghoener said that “time is really running out” and the board had to move on the proposal. He said that while the board was entrusting him and two colleagues on the board to negotiate the final contract without further approval, if any major changes were made from the points presented Friday, they would come back to the board for another vote.
He said repeatedly that the changes to the contract were reached not to stop negative media reports but to move the museum forward, restore public confidence and focus on what the museum contributes to the community.
“We have to stay focused on changes that will be good for the museum and its operations over the long term,” Stranghoener said.
“This is not the kind of change that some of the voices out there are calling for. But it is the kind of change that will be positive.”
Charlene Prost, freelance contributor to the Beacon, contributed information for this story.