The only thing going in is taxpayer money…
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 By James Nesbitt
In a short video on the NAACP website, Mayor Mark Mallory welcomes NAACP delegates to this week’s national convention in Cincinnati and gives some examples of Cincinnati’s recent renaissance, including the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURF). But NURF is not the good example of revitalization that Mayor Mallory suggests it is. Like most government-funded projects, NURF has been a problem from the start. The museum’s construction was made possible only through heavy taxpayer subsidy; 46 million of the 110 million dollars for the project was provided by either the federal, state, county, or local government. This number doesn’t include the value of the land which the City of Cincinnati donated for the building. It gets worse from there. From a Cincinnati Enquirer article in June:
When the Freedom Center was in the planning stages, hopes were high. It would be a unique and inspirational attraction that would draw up to a million visitors a year, planners said in 1997, citing economic impact studies. At the time they were certain that ticket sales and private donations would cover costs.
But two years before the 158,000-square-foot center opened with celebrity-studded fanfare in August 2004, financial troubles already were foreseen.
In 2002, annual attendance estimates were scaled back to 260,000 people, and then-Freedom Center President Ed Rigaud said he anticipated losses of $2 million to $3 million a year. He told The Enquirer, though, that the center would not ask for additional public money to keep its books balanced. Critics still refer to that comment as the reason the Freedom Center should get no public money, even for construction.After it opened, attendance reached a high of 205,944 in 2005 and has declined slightly since to around 162,000 last year. The center lost $5.5 million in its first 18 months of operation, prompting then-CEO John Pepper in 2006 to acknowledge for the first time that the Freedom Center would eventually need a $2 million to $3 million annual public subsidy to cover costs.
Predictably, NURF came back to the government trough with lots of excuses, all pointing to a need for more funds. Fortunately, its efforts have been thwarted for the most part, largely on the account of Cincinnati-area State Representative Tom Brinkman. Keeping this museum on life support through taxpayer subsidies inflates the tax-burden on other local businesses, stifling their potential to find success. With less taxation, many of these businesses would make a profit (and generate tax revenue) because they would ask the fundamental question any business must ask itself if its existence depends on the market: What service can this business provide that consumers will buy? NURF has never considered itself at the mercy of the market, and therefore ignored this fundamental question from the start. As Representative Brinkman said in a letter to party leadership declaring his opposition to state funding, “this institution deserves to sink or swim on its own without government intervention.”
Tags: freedom center, museum, subsidy
