Sunday, July 22, 2012

Arizona Historical Society provides best value?


The AHS website currently boasts that a recent poll identified their History Museum at Papago Park (actually the Marley Center Museum) as a best value. Was that a poll of museum patrons or museum reviewers?

No.

It was the 2012 Wedding Chronicle’s Readers Poll. It recognized the Marley as the “best place for value” to schedule a wedding reception.

If the Marley were a first rate history museum, and if wedding receptions defrayed part of the cost of operating such a state museum, that would be fine. However, the design and maintenance of the Marley both suggest that the tail is wagging the dog at the Marley.  It appears to be a taxpayer subsidized wedding reception center that has old, obsolete and broken interactive museum displays rusting and rotting mostly out of sight on the second floor. Museum attendance appears to be pitifully low, and the AHS will not even release the numbers

Why should Arizona taxpayers provide millions of dollars a year to subsidize a wedding reception facility that competes unfairly with private facilities?

Why are Arizona taxpayers providing the AHS with a half million dollars a year for an Arizona Experience Museum when the AHS never even opened such a museum?

2 comments:

  1. Absolutely unbelievable. What a joke. I doubt that any of the wedding guests go into the museum except to use the facilities, which probably is available in their annexed area that stores tables and chairs or where the reception can be used in case of inclement weather. This is separate from the actual museum building housing exhibits.

    I wonder how many teachers paid the $150 for their one week course on the science of geology, zoos, solar etc?

    Two more years of Brewer and I hope Woosley decides to retire soon, but she is making a bundle.

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  2. There were very few cars in the Marley parking lot during the science course. Most of them probably belonged to employees.

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