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A bid to bring the USS Forrestal to Tampa as a floating museum falls victim to insufficient financial backing.
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 8, 2002
TAMPA -- For three years, the true believers pushed on, fighting to bring the world's largest floating museum to the Ybor Channel. The USS Forrestal would draw a half-million tourists a year, they promised, double as a hurricane shelter and convention center, and serve as a stunning visual reminder of American military might.
They persevered, even as critics howled derision, calling it a supersize white elephant, a 1,086-foot pipe dream. But now, even champions of bringing the supercarrier to Tampa admit the idea is sunk.
Minus a large, unexpected infusion of cash, "You could give the post-mortem right now," said Frank Eurice, a board member of the USS Forrestal Sea, Air, Space Museum Inc.
The museum group, which was behind the Tampa effort, voted last Thursday to close its offices, saying it was $400,000 short of funds needed to pay off debts and perform feasibility studies required by the Navy.
To recoup some of the losses, the group will hold an in-house "flea market" to sell off its office furniture and Forrestal memorabilia -- mock-ups, photos and illustrations of the ship -- and hold a golf fundraiser later this month.
"It's a sad day for an awful lot of people," said John Kercher, chairman of the local museum group, speaking of hundreds of volunteers who have donated their time since the group formed in 1998.
"You've got to recognize, there's a dreamer in us, and there's a realist in us."
Kercher said the group, which has raised $1.2-million but remains $182,000 in debt, would continue to exist as a nonprofit corporation just in case someone pumped in enough cash to resurrect it.
He said the project fell prey to a Catch-22, since donors refused to give money until the Navy awarded Tampa the carrier, and the Navy wouldn't award it without assurances Tampa had the money to take care of it.
Baltimore, another city that has been vying for the vessel, has been even less successful with donors.
It raised only $40,000, said Eurice, who until recently served as chairman of the Baltimore-based USS Forrestal Museum Inc. in addition to his role on the Tampa board.
Eurice said he didn't care which city ultimately got the Forrestal, now docked at a naval port in Rhode Island, provided it is saved from a possible fate as a source of spare parts for other ships.
It didn't help fundraising efforts for the $10-million project, Eurice said, that the Forrestal was caught in a tug-of-war between two cities.
When the idea was proposed to forge a single fundraising group for both Tampa and Baltimore, ensuring contributors that their money would go to whichever city got the carrier, both groups shot it down.
"Unfortunately, both groups had elements in them that were parochial, and it was impossible to sway them out of their biases," Eurice said.
After nine years as a volunteer trying to find the Forrestal a home, Eurice said, he is "quite Forrestalled-out for a while."
"I've lost oodles and oodles of money just in time spent," said Eurice, who works in the furniture business. "You can't give up your day job when you get into something like this."
From the beginning, critics doubted the carrier would draw big crowds, fretted about it blocking Tampa's water view, and worried it would become a black hole for untold tax dollars, even though boosters promised it would be privately financed.
One of the chief boosters was Ed Roberts, editorial page editor of the Tampa Tribune. He did not return a call from the Times on Monday.
-- Christopher Goffard can be reached at 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com.