Louisiana has a treasure trove of cultural and historic establishments, however you’d by no means comprehend it by the best way the Workplace of State Museum runs 9 state-owned entities entrusted to it. That’s the massive takeaway from a latest efficiency audit by Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack.
OSM, also called the Louisiana State Museum, operates 5 museums in New Orleans, one in Baton Rouge and three others throughout the state. It is a part of the state Division of Tradition, Recreation and Tourism, which is led by Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser. In a scathing report on the museum’s administration, Waguespack outlined a collection of operational shortcomings.
For instance, OSM has not had a everlasting museum director appointed through the method outlined in state regulation since Might 2016. It has had 11 administrators since 2004 — seven who served on an interim foundation and three since Nungesser took workplace in 2016. Waguespack notes that the director’s place has “little autonomy and is political in nature.” Nungesser, as lieutenant governor, appoints all 21 members of the State Museum Board.
The report says OSM additionally suffers from low worker morale and lacks a complete strategic plan, an in depth price range and enough advertising sources. Waguespack suggests the museum prioritize hiring a brand new director. The guts of the issue, nevertheless, is the political nature of the museum’s governance.
That wasn’t all the time the case. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, then-Gov. Edwin Edwards appointed an unbiased board and allowed it to rent a director primarily based on {qualifications} — a novel idea in Louisiana. The board employed 32-year-old Robert Macdonald, who served 11 years as museum director (1974-1985) and oversaw a few of its greatest years.
Underneath Macdonald, the museum achieved American Alliance of Museums accreditation, hosted enormously common exhibitions corresponding to “The Solar King: Louis XIV and the New World,” and restored the Previous U.S. Mint in New Orleans, the Previous State Capitol in Baton Rouge and the State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport. The board additionally created the Louisiana Museum Basis in 1981 to broaden personal assist.
Sadly, most of that success has gone away, a sufferer of political meddling.
In response to the audit, Nungesser instructed merging his 9 museums with 9 overseen by Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin and creating regional entities to handle them. Ardoin, who oversees the Previous State Capitol, declined. “We won’t be altering how the museums below our company are managed,” he mentioned. “We’re happy with the work our museum employees has executed throughout Louisiana.”
Any significant reform should embrace taking OSM out from below the thumb of politicians. That can require laws — itself a serious political hurdle.
One promising choice, which Macdonald first instructed in a 2004 evaluation, is for the state to think about a public-private partnership. He cites for example New York Metropolis’s Cultural Establishments Group, a collaborative of personal nonprofits that handle 34 publicly owned entities, together with the Bronx Zoo, Carnegie Corridor, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and the Lincoln Heart — to call just some.
The Audubon Nature Institute makes use of the identical mannequin to handle a number of common public entities in New Orleans. BREC operates an excellent array of parks and sights in Baton Rouge. Although their governance differs barely, Audubon and BREC share a key attribute: Every has a devoted property tax millage. Citizen engagement likewise helps insulate each from political interference.
“Folks must take management. They should come ahead and demand higher,” Macdonald mentioned lately. “There are good examples across the nation of how this may be executed. Louisiana can take the very best of them and provide you with a plan for easy methods to transfer ahead.”
If residents lead, the politicians will observe.