Mayor Mike McGinn wants to keep money headed for the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) to help cover the $67 million budget shortfall faced by the cityâand museum officials and the Seattle City Council are pissed.
"This is not a time for any one community organization to be taking all that it can get, while others go without," Carl Marquardt, lead attorney for the mayor's office, wrote in a letter to the museum. MOHAI director Leonard Garfield and board chair Maggie Walker replied: "We thought we had a deal with you."
The issue began with the state's expansion of the 520 bridge, which will require widening the freeway through the Montlake neighborhood and demolishing the building where MOHAI, the city's archive and history museum, has stood for 58 years. In two separate agreementsâan agreement last June and an ordinance passed last Octoberâthe city gave MOHAI permission to negotiate directly with the state for the price of the building and the land. (Last year's agreement also allows MOHAI to move into Seattle's old Armory Building in South Lake Union.)
MOHAI negotiated extremely successfully with the state. The museum pulled in $40 million for the building and it is expected to make another $7 million from the land, but Mayor McGinn says that's too much. On September 3, he proposed legislation that would take up to $7 million of MOHAI's money for the land.
Now the Seattle City Council appears poised to override the mayor and give the money to MOHAI anyway. "To renege on an agreement that has been seven years in the making is reprehensible," says Council Member Sally Bagshaw, chair of the council's parks committee, which will handle the legislation.
The city owns the building and the parkland where MOHAI currently stands. So why did it authorize the museum to negotiate with the state on its own behalf?
The city would have only been negotiating "for an old empty building," says Council Member Tom Rasmussen. But the museum could bargain as a cultural institution, insisting that the state pay not just for the building, but to set up a whole new museum. Last fall, the city estimated MOHAI would receive about $15 million for the building, according to McGinn's office.
Then the news hit city hall: MOHAI was going to get more than double the estimated amount. "The executive was initially agreeable to this proposal, but that was before the $40 million settlement was revealed," the mayor said in a letter to the city council on September 3. Furthermore, he insisted, MOHAI isn't legally entitled to keep the potential $7 million for the park property.
"We think council should carefully consider and weigh MOHAI's funding needs against other priorities," McGinn wrote, saying the money could be better spent on unfunded city projects such as a new Rainier Valley Community Center and a new South Park Bridge.
"Problem is, the state's compensation is expressly intended to mitigate MOHAI's very real loss," according to MOHAI's Garfield. "The money can't be transferred elsewhere, no matter how worthy the cause or great the need."
The mayor's crusade looks dead on arrival at the city council, which must approve the final transaction and does not appear ready to join the mayor in penalizing MOHAI for conducting such a successful negotiation on its own behalf. A strong majority of the city council appears ready to preserve that deal.
"I am not convinced that we should seek anything different than what we negotiated," Rasmussen says.
"We're moving forward," Bagshaw says. "What the council is saying is that a deal is a deal."
The issue is about more than the museum, Bagshaw adds. For example, the city is attempting to negotiate with NASA for a retired space shuttle to go at the Museum of Flight. "If people can't trust the city to negotiate in good faith," she says, "where will we be on big items like that?" 
