The New Mexican Editorial | Tuesday, Jan 14 Standing, Rolling, Museums Need Work
01/14/2003
or all New Mexico's near-future needs, the past keeps popping up and demanding attention.
The Museum of New Mexico, many of its elements ignored for years, is overdue for repairs. Its centerpiece, the Palace of the Governors, only last legislative session got the state support it needs for restoration and expansion into the world-class institution its artifacts can make it.
Meanwhile, across Lincoln Avenue, the Museum of Fine Arts has fallen victim to a leaky roof and a water-weakened foundation.
Up on Museum Hill, the vigas are weather-rotting at the Laboratory of Anthropology. Asbestos must be removed, and the building needs a whole new stucco job. The Museum of International Folk Art also needs stucco work — and a better security system to protect its increasingly valuable collections. Some of the roof needs replacing at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.
The repair bill could come to $2.5 million — but the longer the Legislature waits, the more it's likely to cost.
As museum director Tom Wilson notes, his institutions are repositories for our state's irreplaceable cultural heritage. On that basis alone they deserve, within reason, a certain hang-the-expenses treatment when it comes to upkeep.
But those buildings are more: They're a vital part of New Mexico's worldwide touristic appeal and all that means to the economy of Santa Fe and the rest of the state. They should be treated as the treasures they are.
Instead, they've gotten what many a public building gets: ignored. Why spend money on maintenance? The place looks fine to me ....
That's the kind of thinking that leads to local bond issues for replacing roofs and repairing storm damage — at multiples of what preventive maintenance would have cost. At the state level, legislators react with a blind eye and a tight fist to building managers' requests for maintenance money.
In the case of the Palace, there are mumblings that renovation and expansion should be put off until all the museum's components have been repaired. But repairs to that historic building, and additions to it, come under the same state, federal and private package of contributions. The state was late enough coming to the table with matching funds for what Sen. Pete Domenici won from Washington. Let repairs and renovation go on simultaneously.
Up on the Colorado border, another museum moulders: the one on wheels known as the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad.
That 64-mile narrow-gauge line, with its steam locomotives and 19th-century cars, is living history and tourist attraction as well.
But it needs work: Historic or not, it comes under the eye of Uncle Sam. The feds are demanding major repairs to the boilers of the three engines that pull visitors from Chama, on our side of the state line, to Antonito on the other.
Repair money is in short supply; last summer's forest fires shortened the railroad's season.
Last weekend, the railroad's bi-state commission extended Rio Grande Railway Preservation Corporation's franchise. Now Colorado and New Mexico must face up to a grim reality: subsidizing the line. Federal money also is needed. Some is on the way: a grant of $1.2 million is expected sometime in the next couple of months to help the line meet the requirements of the Federal Railroad Administration.
The two states' legislatures should consider the Cumbres & Toltec an investment in the economic development of an area with few prospects besides tourism.
©Santa Fe New Mexican 2003
