Big plans for Culture Center hit a snag

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Officials for the Southwest Indian Foundation have been working on plans for several years to convert a portion of the Gallup Cultural Center into a multimillion dollar state-of-the-art museum for the Navajo Code Talkers.

Bill McCarthy, Southwest Indian Foundation’s executive director, said the plans are to house the new museum in the portion of the cultural center that once housed the Greyhound Bus Terminal. The museum is expected to cost more than $2 million, but once it is finished, it will allow visitors to take an interactive visit to the world of the Code Talkers, going from station to station and seeing the Navajos growing up on the reservation in the 1920s and ’30s, leaving Gallup to join the war effort and undergoing training to use the Navajo language as a code to fool the Japanese.

Once completed, McCarthy said, it will go a long way to revitalizing downtown Gallup and convincing tens of thousands of the travelers on U.S. Interstate 40 annually to visit Gallup.

Big plans — but there are a couple of problems that may stand in the way.

The first is raising the money to make the museum a reality, but McCarthy said that with Southwest Indian Foundation’s contacts all over the world, this shouldn’t be a problem, although it’s going to take several years.

The second problem has to do with city officials, who are now in the midst of talking to SWIF about their future occupation of the cultural center.

McCarthy said this really isn’t a problem since Southwest Indian Foundation has a lease that still has many more years to go before it expires. The city, however, says the lease has expired and the city could, if it so desired, ask Southwest Indian Foundation to vacate the building.

To understand the situation, it’s important, said City Attorney R. David Pederson, to go back some 20 years when the cultural center was nothing more than one of hundreds of antiquated railroad depots that dotted the country.

Federal officials felt these depots had value, so in the late 1980s, they created the ISTEA program to provide federal funds to renovate these depots and make them into multimodal centers of transportation. The feds provided the states with seed money, and some of that came to Gallup.

But not enough. Pederson said that in the 1994, the project was still languishing when the state of New Mexico received a lot more severance tax money because of oil price increases. He was a state representative at the time and presented a proposal for $500,000 to finish the renovation. The state came though with $624,000.

Southwest Indian Foundation, which was looking for a site for a Naive American museum, approached the city and offered to assist in running the center and a deal was written up.

Part of the facility — the top floor — would be converted into a museum and Greyhound would use part of the first floor for a bus station, Amtrak would stay and the Navajo Nation Transit System would have its buses stop there as well.

So that is what happened. But while Amtrak still maintains a stop there, Greyhound would eventually move to a new location because of the problems connected with having the nightly summer dances next to the center.

In recent years, city officials have also been questioning the agreement signed by Southwest Indian Foundation and whether or not, Pederson said, Southwest Indian Foundation has been living up to the terms of the agreement. And there are questions, he added, about whether the agreement the city made with Southwest Indian Foundation was legal in the first place.

The reason, he said, is that Southwest Indian Foundation is a private organization and there are state laws that prohibit local governments contributing to non-governmental entities unless the city gets back something in return.

The center has 15,500 square feet, and the going rate to rent out this much space is between $10 and $12 a square foot so if Southwest Indian Foundation had to pay the city a fair market value for the lease, it would be paying the city between $150,000 and $180,000 a year. Instead, as per the agreement signed in 1996, it pays the city $1 a year.

“Of course, the city probably wouldn’t get $150,000 a year if it went to rent it out, but it would clearly get more than $1 a year,” Pederson said.

To get around the state anti-donation clause, the city put a provision in that 1996 agreement that requires Southwest Indian Foundation to use the space for a Native American museum and create a world-class Code Talkers Museum.

Pederson said now that it is 12 years later, Southwest Indian Foundation hasn’t done anything to comply with that agreement. There’s no Code Talker Museum, and what’s on the second floor is not a museum but an art gallery “and the things that are displayed are its own art.”

There is a small museum up on the second floor that has deals with the Native American culture and some Gallup history but Pederson says this doesn’t meet the terms of the agreement.

McCarthy disagrees with this assessment, pointing out that Southwest Indian Foundation has poured in a lot of money — hundreds of thousands of dollars — to improve the building and create a venue that allows Native American craftsmen and women show their artwork. It also has a program that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to promote art and Native American crafts to young people of all ages and all ethnic backgrounds.

Pederson said he has gone through the financial records provided the city by Southwest Indian Foundation and he doesn’t see Southwest Indian Foundation spending a lot of money on the building and the center, unless you take into account the salaries that Southwest Indian Foundation has paid its people who work there.

Southwest Indian Foundation is also claiming that it has a right to stay there because the current lease has four five-year options which will allow them to stay there through the next decade and beyond.

But Pederson doubts that these provisions are enforceable because of the state anti-donation law.

With all of this, however, Pederson said the city is willing to sit down with Southwest Indian Foundation — and is in the process of doing that — to come up with an agreement that will meet state standards and will allow Southwest Indian Foundation to stay in the building.

“All we want is to have an agreement that spells out in clear terms what SWIF will provide in exchange for the lease,” he said. The city needs to get a fair value for Southwest Indian Foundation’s use of the building and it doesn’t have to be cash but it has to be something of value to the community that will fit within the state’s anti-donation laws.

“If Southwest Indian Foundation comes up with something to do this, we won’t quibble over it,” he said. “All they have to do is make us a proposal.”

But Southwest Indian Foundation’s dream of using that space on the first floor for a Code Talker’s Museum may have a problem — the city is talking to officials for Greyhound about possibly moving back to the center.

Greyhound’s lease to the former Visitor’s and Convention Center on Maloney ends in December, and the bus company has a number of concerns about that building. The company is expected to make a decision in the next month as to where they want to be.

If Greyhound opts to come back to the cultural center, Pederson said that Southwest Indian Foundation would have to find alternate space within the center for its Code Talker Museum.