Museum of the Confederacy

[dave81276]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Folks,

You shouldn't worry about the White House. It is a separate entity, is endowed out the yazoo, and can afford to operate daily (never mind the grandstanding for the General Assembly) even if the Museum moves.

I for one will miss Rebecca Rose. She was one of the handful of competent people down there. I hope she has found a job with a more professional organization. I've tried to find more info out about her departure, but it is hard. For the last few years, the MoC has suffered from a "Bunker" mentality.

[Marc]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Regarding the $1.4 million write down. With museums there are several GAAP methods to measure contributed items. From 1992 to 2005 the MOC tracked the value of contributed material at market and acquired items at cost. Collections are not increased in value to market.

SFAS 116, p 11 - 13 lays out the requirement to track contributed collection items. The FASB did not require a contributed or acquired collection be recognized as an asset. All they required was consistency. This, in concert with SFAS 117, provided options for treatment.

In 2006, the accounting firm recommended that the collection acquired since 1992 be written off. This was to provide consistency with the contributed collection. Nothing was sold, it was just written off.

As one might imagine, the collection is priceless.
__________________
Ley,

Thanks for the explanation, without financial footnotes to disclose the elected treatment hard to understand the writeoff.

Being always in the tax department I avoid all those FASB and SFAS, except Fin48 which is interesting unto itself.

[ley74]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Marc:

Always glad you folks were on the other end of the hall, covering our tails.

[Gary of CA]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Lexington is a pretty town, but if they must move, Petersburg is better. Close to Richmond and likelty to get more traffic than Lexington. You have to be a Lee/Jackson buff to want drive out to Lexington and the more famous battlefields are closer to Richmond.

[laurelgirl]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

I don't think that it is moving...

July 12, 2007, The Virginia Pilot

Standoff at the Confederacy

An internal rift over finances dogs the Museum of the Confederacy as it looks to move a national landmark.
by Scott Bass

Waite Rawls is perturbed. The executive director of the financially ailing Museum of the Confederacy is upset that two “disgruntled employees” have started a ruckus over his handling of the museum’s budget. “I’m an expert in finance,” Rawls deadpans between puffs of a Winston cigarette on the museum’s rain-soaked steps last week. His resumé: former managing director of Chemical Bank in New York; vice chairman of Continental Bank in Chicago; chief operating officer of Ferrell Capital Management in Greenwich, Conn.; member of the foreign exchange committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Borrowing Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury; and former director of the Public Securities Association. “Go ahead and interview all the disgruntled directors,” he tells a reporter, dripping with sarcasm. “I think it would be useful for the validity of the article.”

Indeed, the Confederate museum has seen more than half a dozen members resign from its board of trustees in the last year. But one is garnering particular attention. Former trustee and treasurer of the museum David H. Rankin Jr. says Rawls was “dishonest” and “deceitful” with him while preparing a draft of the museum’s budget in 2004, appearing to inflate revenues and expenses “out of thin air.”

Nancy Witt, former director of finance and human resources at the museum, echoed similar concerns in a report to the museum’s board Nov. 4, 2004.

“Waite and I disagreed a lot on this as he would inflate and deflate figures, and I would list them accurately, based on past performance reports,” she wrote in the report. “He said, ‘Budgets are only guidelines and not meant to be followed exactly.’ I laughed and replied, ‘No, budgets are not guidelines here. … if it is not budgeted you cannot spend it, simple as that!’”

News of internal discord comes at a precarious time for the museum. Literally and figuratively, it’s fighting for its financial life. Attendance figures are down significantly as it continues to get swallowed up by Virginia Commonwealth University’s ever-expanding medical campus around it. And Rawls is still trying to drum up support to pick up the White House of the Confederacy and move it, an effort recently stymied by intense criticism from local preservationists, historians and the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Now, in order to stay afloat, the museum is lobbying the General Assembly for about $500,000 in state subsidies to bide more time. By mid-December, the museum was on pace to run a deficit of $500,000 by the end of the 2005-2006 fiscal year. But if attendance continues to drop as Rawls expects, that deficit will balloon to $750,000.

“That leaves the museum bankrupt,” Rawls says. “We do not have unrestricted endowments.”

The museum’s delicate financial situation is about the only thing on which Rawls and his critics can agree. Rankin, who is still receiving monthly financials from the museum (he assumes by mistake), says at the end of November the museum had just $231,000 in cash in its checking account, and $1.15 million remaining in its endowment. And it’s only halfway through the fiscal year.

“I told [other members of the board] what was going on and nobody seemed to care, and I said to heck with it,” says Rankin, who stepped down as treasurer and resigned from the board of trustees in September 2004, shortly after being nominated to serve a fourth term as treasurer. “I said that’s too much of a deficit,” he recalls. “You better cut your expenses in other areas. You’ve got to do something.”

At the heart of the internal rift is a simple question: How much of the museum’s financial woes are its own making?

More than Rawls is letting on, some former board members say. Ginger W. Miller, a former trustee from Dallas who resigned in August, says the museum’s financial situation took a turn for the worse shortly after Rawls came onboard in January 2004.

“I just think the museum is being mismanaged financially,” she says. “We would see things in the budget, operating expenses, salaries — very large numbers — but we didn’t know whose salaries or what the salaries were for. Money was spent on things the board was not aware of.”

Miller points to Atlanta-based NCDS, a consulting firm she says the museum hired to help with its capital fund-raising campaign. She says NCDS was paid $25,000 a month by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (the official name of the museum’s board). Miller says she assumed Rawls would be handling the fund-raising and didn’t understand why the board hired an outside firm.

In an interview last week, Rawls wouldn’t disclose how much NCDS had received. According to the museum’s most recent IRS filing, NCDS received $150,000 for its fund-raising work during the 2004-2005 fiscal year.

Rawls says NCDS was hired to put together a “feasibility study” for its planned capital campaign. What Miller and other former trustees don’t understand, Rawls says, is that an outside firm was necessary to gather honest, unbiased information, particularly regarding the board’s plan to move the White House.

“I’ve gone through a lot of capital campaigns,” Rawls says. “One of the first things you don’t do in a feasibility study is have the people who run the place ask the questions because you will bias the answers.”

As a result of the consulting firm’s work, the museum found that there was sufficient support from potential donors to move the White House. But the capital campaign has been temporarily put on hold for lack of finances.

Thomas Gates, a local financial planner who chairs the board of trustees’ finance committee, says Rankin’s assertion that the board has run up expenses is unfounded. Taking into account the $150,000 it paid to NCDS for fund-raising, Gates points out that the board managed to keep expenses roughly in line with the 2003-2004 fiscal year. Minus the fees to NCDS, the museum spent about $2.10 million in 2004-2005, a less than 2 percent increase from the previous year of about $2.06 million.

Because the museum’s situation was so precarious in the fall of 2004 — with all the talk of possibly moving the museum and the White House — the board had decided to approve a “rolling” four-month budget for the 2004-2005 fiscal year, Gates says, at “my insistence,” and do its best to keep expenses in check. When NCDS came back with its findings in the spring of 2005, he says, the board agreed to meet again and approve a full “annualized budget.”

“I think like any nonprofit organization, I think there are always issues around how you budget and spend your money,” says Gates, adding that he appreciates and respects Rankin’s concerns. “That’s what brings strength to any board — creative tension.”

Rankin, however, insists that the General Assembly should conduct an “independent audit” of the museum’s finances before coughing up state funds. That’s why he sent the state subcommittee studying the cost and feasibility of moving the White House a memo questioning the museum’s handling of the budget, he says.

Delegate R. Lee Ware Jr. (R-Powhatan), chairman of the subcommittee, says he didn’t read the memo, which Rankin mailed Nov. 14, until after the subcommittee met for the final time Nov. 21 and adopted a resolution recommending the 2006 General Assembly allocate state funds to keep the museum afloat while it further studies its options.

“The subcommittee has concluded its deliberation, and we did not discuss it,” Ware says of Rankin’s memo. So the issue is now in the hands of the General Assembly. “Obviously, if there are real financial problems, the state has to be wary of that. We are stewards of the public purse and the public’s trust. … For any money to be spent, it has to be taken up by both the assembly and the governor.” S

[dave81276]

Listening to the Little Birdies . . .

Word on the street is they're moving to Varina. A great benefactor from years past was Jimmy Dean, the Sausage King, who lives in Varina. I'd be willing to bet Dean is giving them some land.

[Emmanuel Dabney]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Well, one thing was made clear to me that must remain true...the White House is staying where it is. As I made clear to them, any removal of that historic building or its fabric will cause me to never rejoin as a member.

It's all sad but I've said it before and will say it again, the MoC must start thinking 21st century and less 1896. Mrs. Davis and crew are dead, what makes the place relevant to your average 21st century visitor?

[dcwilliams29id]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Sorry... duplicate.

[dcwilliams29id]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Did anyone read the article in the Richmond Times Dispatch a few weekends ago that was all about the "controversial confederate flag", written by one of the staffers of MOC? It stated essentially that the entire history of the flag should be considered, and that includes its use during the civil rights movement, and by the KKK, and that we should be sensitive about this. The article also mentioned the removal of the confederate flag from a restoration project at one of the VA house restoration. This really surprised me to see such a slanted PC POV from the MOC.

Chris Williams

[Dignann]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

Lexington comes up short in race to relocate museum

Proposals to the Museum of the Confederacy appear to have revealed several other tourism possibilities

By Jay Conley

The Roanoke Times [Roanoke, Va.]
August 22, 2007

Despite months of trying to lure the world's largest collection of Civil War artifacts to town, Lexington is not at the top of a list of localities being considered for the Museum of the Confederacy's relocation.

"They are on the short list but not at the top of the short list," said Waite Rawls, the museum's executive director.

Since January, Lexington and Rockbridge County officials have worked to broker a deal to renovate the old Rockbridge County Courthouse in historic downtown Lexington as a new home for the museum.

The museum announced in October that it wants to move from its cramped quarters in downtown Richmond in order to build a larger facility and avoid further expansion of the neighboring Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

Initially, museum officials indicated that Lexington, home to the burial sites of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, as well as Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute, would be a good location. The city's proximity to Interstate 81 and a range of other Civil War sites in central Virginia were considered assets that would help draw tourists to Lexington and make the museum successful if it were to locate there.

In April, the museum sought relocation proposals from about 10 localities, including Lexington. The museum wanted to know what facilities and financial incentives the localities would be willing to offer to attract the museum and its promise of tourism dollars.

That information apparently has opened the eyes of museum officials to a range of tourism possibilities throughout the state.

Rawls won't say which localities are being considered or which one is the top contender. Lexington is the only community that has publicly acknowledged an interest in attracting the museum. The other localities have preferred to negotiate privately with the museum.

"We're continuing to have conversations with a whole bunch of people, learning a lot more than we knew before about various visitation patterns in the state of Virginia," Rawls said. "Most of which are pretty encouraging."

Rawls said the museum's board of directors is still on track to negotiate an agreement for a new site by fall.

Lexington's proposal was submitted by the Rockbridge Area Tourism Board after being approved by both the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors and the Lexington City Council. It spelled out how the museum could locate its collection of 14,000 artifacts in the old courthouse and surrounding buildings on Main Street.

The proposal laid out a scenario for renovating the courthouse and creating a public-private partnership to get tax incentives to attract the museum.

Supporters of the museum say Lexington and the Rockbridge County area stand to collect an estimated $1 million annually in tax revenue from the tourist spending that the museum is expected to generate.

Others say the Confederate-themed museum is synonymous with promoting slavery and would be unwelcome in Lexington.

The museum's cramped quarters in Richmond can only display about 10 percent of the collection at a time. A lack of parking and nearby restaurants also has been a concern.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/128919

Eric

[dave81276]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy is Moving

The Museum is moving to Varina, Virginia, just outside Richmond.

If it did move to Lexington, most of the staff would quit, at least from what I've heard. Now, Waite Rawls would like to move it to Lexington, so he could retire near his alma mater, VMI. Luckily, Rawls can't move it without the Board's approval. A little birdie told me that Rawls and the Lexington City Council were just scratching each others' backs. Rawls could try to blackmail the City of Richmond for more support, a la the Richmond Braves, and Lexington could raise property taxes for a potential renovation of the building to house the Museum. And once property taxes go up, they rarely go down.

[ley74]

Tell-tale signs

Found this on Funk and Wagnall’s back porch.

Answer: Bifurcation

Question: What will happen to the White House and Museum?

Here you go -

The MOC will separate itself from the White House, with the endowment remaining with the Building. Grant money is being used up as quickly as possible that was earmarked for the White House deferred maintenance. This cleans everything up for step two.

The Confederate Memorial Literary Society (that is the MOC and White House) sells the two buildings to VCU. It will be stipulated that the MOC can stay until a new facility is completed. Proceeds (not enough, however) from this sale will seed the new MOC and the move.

VCU will raze the MOC building, reverting this little part of Clay Street back to the gardens that once graced the mansion. Who knows what VCU will do with the White House, as far as tours, etc. Time will tell.

The MOC will attempt to raise a capital fund to complete the new museum and the move. It will be tough, as they have managed to aleniate many long-time supporters. The capital campaign will fall short of full funding and being able to generate sufficient working capital to complete the move process debt free.

They will change the name of the MOC, in an attempt to appeal to a wider group. The improved PC name may help but, it will not solve the funding issues.

As a result the MOC (pick a name) will have to borrow heavily. Without the assets of the White House endowment, they will place the collection up as collateral. This will provide many mailings of "save the collection" from the big, bad, bank.

The unnecessary drama created over the past several years is disturbing. Who can really project what the end game will be? Not me. Whether it is Varina (isn't that special that the MOC may move there) or somewhere else does not matter. Em is dead on correct. Until they come into the 21st century, there is no telling. In the mean time, staff wears out and leaves.

As far as Dr. Coski's book on the Battle Flag goes, it is best you do not comment unless you have read the thing. John Coski is one of the good folks and too many fire-breathers just do not get the point that the "flag" has been usurped by some pretty bad folks. His book is an evenhanded examination of the flag. Buy it, or obtain a copy from the library, and read it. You may be surprised. Where were all these fire-breathers when the KKK and Skin Heads started marching around with a symbol of heritage?

I miss what was once a great relationship with this institution. Try as I might, it is difficult to support a soap opera.

Sad. Very, very sad.

[FlatLandFed]

Richmond museum story on MSNBC

I'm not a frequent viewer of msnbc so I missed this story last week:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20463758/

To me, the article could be valuable in that it encourages others to investigate American history and particularly our period of interest, but the shallow presentation achieved by quoting only a couple of tourists makes me want to visit both of these sometime to see if I agree with their impressions. (I'm thinking I would not, but that's from my already formed conception of the "causes" of the war.)

I've read the threads about possible moving of the MofC. Those of you who have toured both of these museums/collections -- what do you like better about one or the other?

Thanks.
Paul Hadley

[PVT.THIB]

Re: Richmond museum story on MSNBC

Paul,
I have visited both and like the MoC much better. It seemed to me and American Civil War Center that too much was being thrown at a person. I guess my favorite part about the MoC is its amazing collection. You hear about all of these people growing up but to see their effects really brings it home for me. As a living history interpretor, you hear about this jacket and that pair of pants but to actually see them in person is really awe inspiring.
Just my .02,

[ley74]

Re: Museum of the Confederacy

Paul:

Both are excellent for different reasons. The one added feature you should explore at the MOC is "the rest of the collection". Only about 10% of the collection is on display at any given time. Prior to your trip, contact the MOC about a tour of the vault. You will be impressed.