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Faltering museum, city talk over lease
By BRYAN GILMER, Times Staff Writer ST. PETERSBURG -- When Florida International Museum leaders and St. Petersburg City Council members sat down together last week, the conversation got tense: The museum chairman referred to a city notification that the museum had defaulted on its lease as a "kick in the teeth." Last Thursday, after hearing chairman Bill Tapp talk of how that notice had harmed the museum, the City Council rescinded it. Tuesday, both sides sat down again together and spoke of a renewed spirit of partnership. "If it would be helpful, we can back off our request that we expand to the second floor," Tapp told council members. Last week he said the nonprofit museum needed to move quickly to create new gallery space for upcoming exhibits. Tuesday, he said museum leaders would squeeze the museum's John F. Kennedy exhibit into less space and make do with a single floor for now. "I think that helps immeasurably, and I really applaud that spirit of cooperation," said City Council member Virginia Littrell, who called for both discussion sessions after becoming concerned about the museum. The city and the museum are trying to agree on a plan for FIM's future. Originally, civic-minded volunteers founded it to fill a cavernous building vacated by a downtown department store. The museum staged itinerant "blockbuster" exhibits there that brought hundreds of thousands downtown. To help the museum raise cash, the city later bought the building and land and leased them back to the museum in two multimillion-dollar transactions. But the museum had disappointing performances for its last full year of blockbusters in 1999, so it tried a year-round, multiexhibit format. That drew fewer than 50,000 visitors and lost half a million dollars last year. Not staging blockbuster exhibits violated the terms of the museum's lease. Now the museum and the city are about to sit down to write a new one. The new lease could look very different than the current one. For instance, the museum now runs the four-level museum building and parking garage, but the city could lease the museum just one or two floors and seek other tenants for the extra space. "In the next lease, we need to focus on them being the best museum they can be and not landlord for other space," Littrell said. City economic development staffers and attorneys agreed to work with council members to make a list of changes to the lease. "The city has really gone out on a limb twice for FIM," Littrell said. "It would appear that we need to get that new lease in favor of the city again."
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From the Times South Pinellas desks |
