This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 29, 2012 - Exactly 25 years ago, amid controversy at the Missouri History Museum involving eight missing Native American artifacts, voters approved adding the history museum to the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District, or ZMD.
The next year, in 1988, Robert Archibald arrived to take charge of a small, financially challenged institution that has grown into a major accredited museum. That same year, the ZMD and Missouri Historical Society’s board of trustees signed an operational contract that, like Archibald himself, today is at the center of another highly charged public debate.
That contract between the privately held, then 122-year-old Missouri Historical Society, which operates the museum, and the public tax district set up a dual governance arrangement that seemed to work -- at least until recently.
Looking back, both the Missouri History Museum and the Missouri Botanical Garden came into the ZMD in the 1980s with similar arrangements. As a result, those two institutions are managed differently than the original three cultural institutions voted into the tax district in 1971.
The St. Louis Art Museum and the Zoo already received tax support from the city when they entered the district. The St. Louis Science Center, formerly the Museum of Science & Natural History, had been trying to make ends meet on its own, with no tax money.
After entering the district, a ZMD subdistrict commission took over governance at each of those three institutions, and those commissions are still solely in charge. Each commission includes five members appointed by the mayor of St. Louis, five by the St. Louis county executive, and two advisory members. Since then, commission members have appointed successors who are then approved by the mayor or the county executive.
J. Patrick Dougherty, the ZMD's executive director, said for the Art Museum, Zoo and Science Center, the subdistrict commissions “are the board of directors. They run it and are responsible for day to day operations.”
The institutions do have associated foundations and the like, mostly for private fund raising, but they are not involved in day-to-day operations.
Voters approved admitting the Missouri Botanical Garden to the tax district in 1983, and five years later, the History Museum.
Both were long established, privately held, nonprofit institutions governed by their own boards. When they entered the district, their boards remained in place to oversee day-to-day operations and the spending of private money. The boards also operate alongside and under terms of annually renewable contracts with tax subdistrict commissions.
The ZMD put the subdistrict commissions in place at the History Museum and Missouri Botanical Garden to distribute and monitor the use of millions of dollars of tax money that flow in each year.
Keeping track of tax money
Today the tax district generates a total of about $70 million for the five cultural institutions -- a giant increase from a total of $3.9 million in the first year.
To monitor how those tax dollars are distributed and spent, the ZMD uses a multilayered approach, Dougherty said.
One layer is a voucher system but one that differs depending on the institution.
At the Art Museum, Zoo, and Science Center, a voucher requesting tax money for a purchase or payment of a bill must be signed first by a representative of the institution’s tax subdistrict commission. It then goes to the tax district office where it must be signed by Dougherty and by a representative of the ZMD’s board before the tax money is handed over.
At the History Museum and at the botanical garden, a voucher request must be signed by a representative of the board of trustees and by a representative of the tax subdistrict commission before it is sent to the tax district office to be signed by Dougherty and by a representative of the tax district board.
Each of the five cultural institutions also hires outside firms to do yearly audits. The audit reports are then sent to the district office. At least since 2002, when Dougherty came in as executive director, he said, “Every audit report I’ve seen has had a clean opinion, with no audit issues.”
In addition to yearly audits, the ZMD’s board does its own yearly review of budgets and financial operations at the five institutions. If questions arise, if the board sees something it wants to investigate or finds something that sends up a red flag, the board sends auditors back to the institution to take a closer look and get more information. The auditors bring back to the board an “agreed-upon procedures” report with the requested information, and advisory comments.
In early September, an auditor’s report ignited the current controversy and criticism of the History Museum because of findings on the museum’s purchase, in 2006, of property on Delmar Boulevard.
History Museum officials have defended the purchase, saying that the subcommission's permission wasn't required because private money was used.
Dougherty said he couldn’t address the legal aspect.
“From an organizational and procedural standpoint,” he said, “I would argue that the subdistrict should (have been) involved because in this situation, the land was being acquired for a building, and a building would require more operational expenses that tax money would be used for. So if you look at it that way, I think it’s a reasonable thing to expect buy-in from the subdistrict.”
The controversy has since ballooned to include criticism about Archibald’s salary and perks and about the management practices of the museum’s trustees.
On Friday, the museum’s board changed the contract with Archibald although his base yearly salary will remain $375,000. Among other things, the board shortened the contract term to one year and said that any payout for his unused vacation days, valued now at $580,000, would come from private sources and not the tax district. It also reduced his annual vacation from eight weeks to four weeks although Archibald still gets six weeks a year for research.
Resolving the governance issues
Former Sen. John C. Danforth recently waded into the mess, at the request of all the parties involved.
His specific charge from the officials: negotiate a new contract between the History Museum’s board and the ZMD that better defines the role and responsibilities of the subdistrict commission and that reflects “the proper relationship between the public and private interests.”
The existing contract, according to a newspaper report in 1988, gives the subdistrict commission “the right at all reasonable times ... to inspect and examine the facilities, all of the facilities’ personal property, records, books of account and financial statements and working papers of the history museum.”
The 1988 contract made the Missouri Historical Society “fully responsible for the care, maintenance and improvement of the facilities (including ... all insurance), and all of the history museum’s displays, fixtures and personal property whether located within the facilities or elsewhere.” It said also that the society was required to give the tax district an annual report of “all of its operations.”
But amid debate about whether the museum should have gotten subdistrict commission approval to buy the property on Delmar, the ZMD board asked the auditors to take a closer look at things.
The auditors at Kerber, Eck & Braeckel said that after inspecting the subdistrict's bylaws, they found that “no specific powers or duties are provided in the document,” except that “a budget committee was created for the primary purpose of reviewing the budgets of the museum and subdistrict.”
Their report also advised the subdistrict commission to set up a better system for reviewing and evaluating its contract with the History Museum.
Dougherty at the Zoo-Museum District agreed that at the History Museum, the role of the subdistrict commission is murky at best, other than its charge to review the museum’s budget.
And the situation at the botanical garden, also operating with a dual governance arrangement?
“We’ve not looked at that in great detail,” Dougherty said. “We’ve not done the same review there."
Today, the ZMD is meeting to review Danforth's proposed solution, which was approved by the museum’s trustees Friday. The museum’s subdistrict commission is expected to vote this week, possibly as early as Tuesday.