Park and Recreation Commission - Regular Meeting

February 25 and this is the Museum of Riverside Board.

Pursuant to the city council rules of procedure in order of business resolution, the members of all boards and commissions and the public are reminded that they must preserve order and decorum throughout the meeting. In that regard, members of the boards and commissions and the public are advised that any delay or disruption in the proceedings or a refusal to obey the orders of the board or commission where the presiding officer constitutes a violation of these rules. The city of Riverside is committed to fostering a workplace that provides dignity, respect, and civility to our employees, customers, and the public they serve.

Tony, would you please call the roll? Yes. Julie? Here. Cynthia? Here. Anna here

Richard here Sharon here we have absent today Claudia, Luz, Peggy and Mary but we do have a quorum to proceed

thank you Tony this is the portion of the meeting specifically set aside to invite your comments regarding any matter within the Museum of Riverside Board's jurisdiction. Individual audience participation is limited to three minutes. If you are in person, please complete and submit a speaker card to the museum staff. To comment via telephone call (951) 826-8688. Press 9 to be placed in the queue to speak.

Individuals in the queue will be prompted to unmute by pressing 6 when you're ready to speak. To comment via Zoom use the following link https:zoomusj926969x1265 select the raise hand function to request to speak. An on screen message will prompt you to unmute and speak.

Meeting.

Tony, do we have any e comments?

We do not have any e comments received by the 01:00 deadline today. We do not have any in person speaker cards here in the chambers. And we currently at this time do not have callers or Zoom attendees on the line for item number one.

Thank you so much. We'll move on to our consent calendar item number two is our first item of the day and that's the minutes from our last meeting on February 4. I hope you all got a chance to look at that I will entertain a motion please.

Motion to approve.

I second.

Thank you both so much. Are there any additions or corrections? If not Tony will you please call the roll and we will complete that business yes Julie yes

Cynthia yes Anna

yes

Rich Yes.

Sharon? Yes. Motion carries unanimously.

Thank you. Under our discussion calendar today is item number three which is the Museum of Riverside strategic plan workshop and turning your attention to that is that the board will discuss and provide input on the Museum of Riverside strategic plan for 2027 to 2032 and Robin if you'd like to make remarks at this time

I would just like to go ahead and solicit your comments and would request that you go through it page by page. That if you have comments, we'll just start at the beginning and work through. We did model this draft plan on the previous or actually currently active plan. So, those of you who were there at the time when we approved the current plan, well not find much difference because the dominant thought was that we have some pretty big projects before us that we're in the middle of and it's very important for us to complete them. And the next big project that will be part of this five year plan is achieving reaccreditation.

So we didn't think could take on any major new initiatives with the resources that we have. That said, I would entertain any comment on the format of the plan if there's anything you're accustomed to from other strategic plans that you believe is useful that we should include or anything that you find extraneous? Comment on that.

Are we gonna go page by page or can I just jump in?

Say again?

Are we gonna go page by page or can I

jump

Sure, we can start with page five which is just the executive summary of the kind of the quick reference of all the categories?

The only comment I had, I know it's because I'm familiar with the format, is would it be possible to put the date and if this is already etched in stone I understand but the main museum reopening that's the my eyes zeroed in on that and I wanted a date there.

I'd like to put the date there too.

Sure. We can.

But we can.

I kind of thought so.

Any other comment on the summary page? If not, we'll go ahead and go to page six which is the of the main event right now which is getting the main museum reopened.

So, one question I have on six is when you say no more than 10% of staff time is expended on resolving unanticipated operational residual stuff. I assume that depends on full staffing or

current stuff. It does. Since we didn't actually budget staff time in this way, we don't budget staff time to programs. It'll be something we would have to develop a work order and track. So if we wind up having to deal with a lot lot of warranty issues, for instance, on building systems, or we find that we have to completely change the way we initiate our POS, you know, front desk system.

Time we invest in adjusting or completely redoing some aspect of our operations that we established right before the main reopening will track in this way so we know whether we did a good job in our plan basically. And we'll report on this.

And then on page seven, document, just for my own clarification. How does one measure public satisfaction?

Yeah. That's a hot topic. Of course, the simplest metric is whether people are coming and whether they're expressing their satisfaction through surveys or just spontaneous expressions of, and you can place people, observers in galleries and watch public reaction to kind of get a sense of how people are feeling about what they're experiencing. We will, of course, do some kind of surveying. We don't want to burden people in the first few months of operation with that kind of thing, but in we will instigate some kind of surveys that would be on-site rather than something they would take away.

It would be limited to a very small number of questions. It's also difficult to quantify a qualitative experience, which is what we've been dealing with in the museum and cultural field forever. The expectation that grantors want to put numbers experiences is that sometimes the impacts take a generation to manifest and you can't prove, for instance, that someone who has had a great professional life had that because of their epiphany from their museum experience. You can get testimonials from people, but again it's not what would be considered statistically valid. Counting of course.

And we have numbers from before the museum was closed to be renovated. It's not the same operation though, so it won't make sense necessarily to compare with the prior numbers. We expect expect to see those numbers by quite a bit, but all the same. So we don't have a benchmark that's been set for us that we need to achieve. And I have a very difficult time even figure out what that could be because during the time that we've been closed, of course we've had the pandemic, we had a number of other things that have kind of changed the way, have changed the museum going public.

It's harder for museums to get visitation these days. People are more and more engaged in virtual experiences. So we can't even kind of use what we know about the past and past behavior to estimate what will happen.

Thing I observed in the stewardship section, To me, the most important in that bucket is the developed long range conservation plan and pursue urgent treatments. I don't think the museum is really much used to the community if collections aren't being cared for. So that to me seems when I see it in the list, I'm almost like should that just come first because it seems like a quite an important priority. And then secondarily, secondarily, wondering about the timing and I'm sorry if I'm a bull in a China shop. I don't know the It seems like a uniquely bad timing to be seeking reaccreditation as like things are kind closed and opening.

So, was wondering about

We have the the choice. AAM's accreditation commission has its schedule and we are due at this moment. Very good. Wow. Okay.

Well, that's on us.

Yeah. Okay. Let's jump on down to page seven. Is there anything there relating to a little bit more of the detail of our reopening? We've broken out Nature Lab from the other exhibitions even though right now we're working on planning all of them together and our exhibition design firm has all four within their brief because Nature Lab is fundamentally a different kind of exhibit.

It's kind of the closest thing we're going to have to a permanent exhibit even though aspects of it will change and rotate. That's So why that's listed separately whereas the other three are true temporary exhibitions that will rotate out of galleries on a staggered schedule.

And I feel like we've been updated along the way on those that we've heard a lot about those exhibits.

We're reaching the stage particularly with the immigration exhibition where we plan to do a little bit of prototyping of some of the interpretive panels and labels which means basically that we'll output them at scale and take them out to people who have no knowledge of the planning that we've been engaged in and see if we're getting our messages across and see if they're clear to people. So, again, the public satisfaction thing. We'll figure something out and hope that we can call a quantifiable and reliable measure. I think you're all familiar with those really, really brief, you know, unhappy, neutral, smiley face things. I don't want to do anything that childish.

But I would to do something that makes it possible for visitors to give immediate response about how they feel.

Some sort of an exit.

Okay, anything on that? So, next page, page eight, we start getting into the Jurata House project and what will be involved in that and we actually do have our construction budget now, which I didn't have at the time we drafted this. So, we'll be able to make those updates to this. And our dates in conjunction with that are from the architect. As I think I've mentioned, we believe our architect is pretty optimistic.

So we'll be building in some bureaucratic padding. But I do believe that it's very possible to open the site by the 2028.

One of the things you had in there was site visitation at 75% site capacity. What is the site capacity?

You mean the main museum?

No. The

Herrata House. Herrata. Okay. Site capacity is gonna be pretty small in the same way that Heritage House is pretty small. So, what we'll figure out is the number of hours we're open.

We'll be offering tours through the house in the same way that we do with Heritage House. That is, they must be docent led and they're done at certain times so we can calculate the maximum capacity per day, open day. And that's what we were basing that number on. I expect that we may be in a situation where we have to determine whether we keep, whether we have a house open the same days as we have a heritage house open or we have it open different days. Obviously, we open both sites for special school tours, whether they're public hours or not.

And the other complication is that since we're gonna be initiating admission prices, and they're intended to be multi day and all sites, we have to figure out how that's gonna work. If somebody comes on Tuesday to the main museum and wants to go to one of the other sites, it has to wait till Friday to go to either of them, then that may be a big disappointment for an out of towner. We just have to work on how to manage that multi site, multi day ticket. Okay, we'll move on to page nine which again is further historic house projects, the documentary for Herrata House, which is underway. Phase one is underway.

Heritage House, we continue to work through a list of small scale at this point and incremental site improvements. I think everybody looks forward to something being done about the restrooms, so that's at the top of the list there. Way finding, of course, we've been talking about for awhile. Some of these have allocations that we can tap and some of them may have some costs that are on budget at this point. And in reference to a question that Cynthia asked before the meeting started.

When we originally put our strategic plan together years ago, we had individuals listed under staff point people. And we changed that to titles, which makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, but you do have to keep in mind which of those positions are filled. And currently, we do not have a curator history and we do not have an exhibition design.

Will there be probably some sort of celebratory introduction of this documentary in town when it's finished?

Yes. I'm imagining. Up to and including international film festivals. This is gonna be We're aiming for the top with the production of this documentary. We'll probably screen it in the box or someplace like that. Of course, a little screening area will be in the interpretive center for Harada House. Yeah, we're gonna make a big deal.

Yeah, it's gonna be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Okay,

page 10. Responsible historic preservation Heritage House. A historic structures report is a fairly standard document in historic preservation which provides kind of baseline information for how to proceed with preservation measures and interpretive measures. We don't have one for Heritage House. We have one for Gerardo House, and we have one for the main museum. We would like to fill that gap by getting that important document done in the term of this plan.

That would be by your staff? No. Outside? A consultant. Thank you. As

for a comprehensive plan for interpretation, all those elements that would be staff. Furnishing plan, inventory, converting our room books to an updated digital platform, that sorts of things. Those would all be done by And of course, the curator of history would figure largely in that. Until that position is filled, we probably won't make much progress on some of those.

Robin, is the one successful grant application at least by June, Is that submitted or funded? Assume it's submitted.

Which one are we looking at?

So measurable success criteria at the top. Second bullet.

For Heritage House.

For Report serves as a basis for at least one successful grant.

Right. So this would That would be late in the term of this plan. So we'd hope to get the historic structures report done and in hand by the first half of the plan in order for us to apply for a grant and secure it by that deadline. The grant would then, of course, be to address whatever the key recommendations are that the historic structures consultant would include in the report. But if you're asking do we apply by June 30 or do we land the grant by June 30, I'll clarify.

It is a success.

Yeah, if we successfully push the button, that's not very impressive. Page 11. We're moving into the next category of action which is inspiring and connecting. This centers very much on our programming, our outreach and so forth. So, of course, on the website, we're continuing to do that.

I hope everybody is happy with the way it is now compared to the way it was. If not, I'll meet you at the woodshed. We've been working a long time on that and finally I think it's a lot better. And then we have to, even now we're starting to think about what that second round of exhibitions will be in the gallery. We're just keeping a constant rotation of experiences through that space, all those spaces. I would like to get one more, at least one more mini museum out. Oh, I see what happened to neighborhood. It's there. It just got the word got

Oh, it is hyphenated onto the next one. Okay. I see it too.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's We have another mini museum unit much like the one that's in the Casablanca neighborhood now and are slated to get that one filled on the topic of grizzly bears and put in a West Side location, probably Ward 7 somewhere. But then we have other ideas of what we could do and we're constantly building the community collection to give us some raw material to include in some of these. All of them don't have to look the same. All of them that we have on view now, the three we have on view, are not even remotely like each other.

The main thing is identifying locations where we can have these little mini museums and multiply ourselves out across the city, Sites that are willing to host them. So, we do wanna work on that.

Robin, what's an example of a non mission based content?

Which one are you Which action?

That's the first column. Second bullet. Content increases by 20% each of the five years on the planet. Emphasis on mission based.

Is it on page 13 or

11.

Oh, back in 11. Okay.

Oh, see. Oh, content on the website. So, mission based content is relating to the collections or the exhibitions or the programs, not the mechanics of where you park how you visit and how you join.

You provide a little context about the re envisioning what an exhibition is and what at that, I'm not sure what that means, but I'm excited to hear that that's happening. I just don't know. It's the same page. It says, it's a second paragraph second line re envisioning what an exhibition is do we mean like digitally or it's yeah

yeah so museums conventionally think of exhibitions as things that happen in their controlled gallery spaces and our mini museum program is part of getting away from that. So, we would put things out in public spaces where we don't see people interact with them, we don't get much feedback, we can't count visitors, none of that. But it's a way of getting content somewhere else. In addition also to thinking about virtual exhibitions, so we may have an idea. We have more ideas than we have exhibition space for or time to put together physical exhibitions, but we can put virtual exhibitions on the website.

Just thinking too about whether we might go out into a neighborhood and think of the neighborhood itself for a while as an exhibition and how would we interpret that? Through a program or through perhaps a series of interpretive panels that we might seek permission to install in the neighborhood. Part of discussing what that really means would include all stakeholders and when the moment comes when we feel like we can explore this, you know, the board would be invited. Anybody who's interested in our programming directions and what we can do within the resources we have. Thinking about exhibitions that way is pretty resource efficient because it usually doesn't require hundreds of thousands to do a big gallery exhibition or produce a publication or anything like that.

It's something that you can just go right into the space and think, How can where I'm standing right now be interpreted as an exhibition and what would I say about this part of the city or this moment in time? Does that answer the question?

Yeah, thank you.

Okay, page 12. We're again on programming development, outreach, evaluating what we do. Evaluation, formal evaluation is a big thing that we don't do very often. We know we should do it more. We do have a few in house mechanisms that we use, but sometimes museum people kind of wonder why should we do this because every one of our exhibitions is different and what we learn from one isn't necessarily applicable to another.

But there are other levels of evaluation that we can engage in and you can make sure that for instance we don't overstretch ourselves in certain ways in the planning process, if we learn that we went about something logistically flawed, we hopefully won't repeat it, but sometimes you have to sit around a table and analyze what you did to know what you've learned. So we want to get a little more engaged with evaluative activity. Again, deliberately, regularly, with outside feedback. We'll take feedback from friends and enemies because sometimes the feedback from the people who don't like you is the most valuable. Just keep moving along, we can go back of course.

Page 13, Again, tracking and measuring participation in others events. We still do this. We do this all the time, we do track how much our visitation comes from our participation in events that are organized by others. We'll continue to do that and start to report on it a little more effectively. We will be taking over, I should say resuming control of Insect Fair because it originated with the Museum of Riverside.

The timing of this is currently in flux. We had planned to take it on in 2028 when we would have full staffing complement, but the Arts and Culture Division of Parks Department is inclined to give it to us sooner, so we're doing what we can to manage that transition already. It will occur in the same place this year as last, in the backyard of the main library. We keep being told that space will not be available in the future so it's possible that by 2027 we may try to figure out how to do it on Mission Avenue in front of our still closed construction site or we may try to get it in a city park. As you know, those of you who have attended, Insight Fair is a very popular event.

It was record crowds even last year when it rained. So we're gonna try to keep building that and bring it back to its roots as fundamentally a partnership between UCR's entomology department and us. Page 14, there you see the reaccreditation process. Again, on a schedule not determined by us. It's possible to readdress that question.

That when the commission learns that our building may not be open yet, by the time they want to send their visiting committee, that they opt to defer the final visit. That will also not be up to us. Expanding outreach. Our education staff is not going to increase in size, so expanding outreach is going to require effective more dose and training to make it possible for a dose and core to multiply ourselves and independently offer programs to help us reach different audiences whether with curriculum based programming or not. We have been planning for some time and still haven't done it, but doing a survey in the schools, the RUSD and Oliver to to find out what the museum might do to help teachers meet their mandates, what the obstacles are to this participation.

Is transportation an issue or is it not an issue? Is funding an issue or not? Is there a cost sharing possibility or not? Just to do some of this really practical investigation. So page 15, again seeking new outreach partners, upgrading and growing the docent program.

Of course, when Heratta House opens, we'll have an entirely new need for docents with a different body of knowledge. So that will sync with that opening. And of course, the main museum need to have the crew back that was there before that were more generalists and could speak to more of the disciplines that the museum handles have some volunteer support in the nature lab for the natural science oriented.

Robin, were the dose levels in 2017 sufficient?

I believe so, but again the exhibitions didn't change to speak of for quite a long time. So the nature lab was locked when there were no school tours. At the time it wasn't an open explorable experience by anybody who visited the museum. So that's not the way it's going to be this time. All the spaces are going to be designed for self guided experience. Will be open all the time and will benefit from volunteers who can just be present to answer questions and help visitors understand and enjoy their experience in a way that there were fewer opportunities before.

So given that, you're going to have more open spaces more of the time added to the more specialists at the Rada House. Is 25% going to increase going to be sufficient or are you looking at at least 25?

At least. But you're making a good point now. You're convincing me that it might need to be a bigger number that we really may need to recruit more. Maybe just inserting it. Good point. That's why we're having this catch us in our errors.

Could you talk a little bit about Project Bridge? Do I not

Project Bridge. It's on target only, but Project Bridge. Yeah, I don't know that much about it. That's something that Teresa had indicated at one point might be some A group that we could participate with more. Same with the others that are mentioned there.

Okay.

They're sort of less conventional connections for outreach programming rather than just going to the schools or inviting the schools. Juvenile detention centers, I'll just use an example from where I worked before in Montana. The Montana women's prison was three miles from the museum, so we had a very active program there. That's great. There isn't that kind of an organization near, but we can look and see what kinds of social service organizations might benefit from us being able to offer programs.

We already are building a pretty solid relationship with the school for the deaf and I can see that growing quite a bit. Good. That's great. Okay, and then again when we put measures of success in here, we start pinning numbers to things that are hard to quantify. When we say we're going to aim for a certain number of programs at each site, each year, whether we achieve that or not will be part of what winds up being reported as we go.

If we find, for instance, that we can't do 25 programs at Heritage House, although we already do, or we can't do 15 for Heratta House, then we'll explain why we need to make an adjustment.

And, did we clarify about It says 12 programs and there's a note. Is that total or per site? And, I think

Yeah. Yeah, that's a note from one of our staff members that I haven't yet made any adjustment to that. Okay. To respond to that. So this year, just as a point of reference, we're doing about 65 programs in the absence of the main museum.

Technically, I don't really think it should be difficult to hit these marks, But, I'd rather be able to put something in the quantifiable success criteria that seems attainable and then brag about exceeding it rather than put something in there that sounds great but isn't possible to achieve. Page 16, again more on website enhancement which is ongoing now. We're beefing that up all the time. And then page 17, the stewardship section starts I hear you, Anna, we're going to do a little rearrangement on the priorities even though these aren't technically listed in priority order. We can certainly move that long range conservation plan to the top.

TMS Collections is our database system. It's a museum custom database system. It does have the capacity to, it does have a module for implementing a digital visitor portal and we have budgeted to bring that online in the twenty seventh, twenty eighth fiscal year. So, page 18. Ongoing efforts which are really taking some significant strides lately to improve and rehouse collections and storage.

Move forward with a more regular rolling inventory of all the collections, making sure that the records reflect locations for everything. And equipping workspaces. Workspaces are difficult. That's one of the reasons why some of the projects get stalled is we don't have any place to set up someone to work, either volunteer, intern, or staff member. But we're working on that, gets better.

Conservation, again the long term plan. Which that would comprise everything from the serious need for a purpose built collection storage warehouse into which we could move everything that's in our two and a half warehouses now. To the minutiae of equipping on-site treatment photography setups, individual object treatment priorities, etcetera. Continuing the ongoing support we provide to the indigenous community through repatriation and other facilitated access to their resources. We do this willingly and happily, not just because it's legally required.

Consultations, we just had a consultation last week with one of the local tribes, so this is ongoing. It's just a matter of keeping the process moving forward. Then there are a lot of online databases that we can participate in, more than ones that we already are part of. Be identifying those more and figuring out what the technical requirements are for participating. Many of them are natural history oriented.

So hopping ahead, page 20 takes us to the last section, maximizing resources. So we've been moving more and more in the direction of having an organizational chart for the museum that looks like other museums' organizational charts. So, addition of the marketing institutional advancement portion of our plan as one aspect of that and that will increase even more when we have more visitor services or public facing staff members after we reopen. When we bring on for instance a volunteer and event coordinator. When I first started here, staff was very heavily on behind the scenes curatorial and collection staff, which ironically did not necessarily result in a lot of progress in some of the jobs that should have been done behind the scenes, but there was no one to raise money, no one to run an event.

The public facing requirements weren't adequately staffed. So we're gonna try to turn that around. Professional development and some individual tasks we have associated with that. Several years ago, we started a process of periodically going to other museums. Best practices trips where individual staff members will pair off with their counterparts or we'll all tour behind the scenes aspects of their facilities to learn what we can, even if we can't emulate what we see, we can certainly always learn something from it.

We just did one of these trips last week. We went to the Anticultural Museum in Palm Springs, which is a new facility we highly recommend if you are out that way. We'll continue to do these kinds of things that actually have proven beneficial so far. We continue to work through and with, because it's required, the city's HR department with regard to recruiting volunteers, but there's a lot that we can do to clarify what the opportunities are and make sure that volunteers who are recruited feel like they're having a meaningful experience and stay with us.

What does that reach look like?

Say again?

What's the reach actually look like? So you've got by about a year from now. Mhmm. It's the same that you've identified a range of opportunities. So, how will you be reaching out?

We can reach out through any of our communication means and of course we can use the website for this as well. But when we talk about expanding opportunities, in a way it's writing job descriptions for volunteers. So what are the things that we can use volunteer help for behind the scenes or public facing? And be more specific about what that is so that people don't just sort of amorphously sign up to be a volunteer and find that well there actually isn't anything here I want to do. Or they find out that they love people but really the work we need the most is in collections and they'd be working alone.

So these are the kinds of clarifications to the program and the opportunities we want to make sure that we can get out there. And it's a fluctuating thing too because we have interns as well on a regular basis and sometime interns are all we can manage. We can't take on another volunteer when we have a full complement of interns. And then fundraising specifics. Remember too that this plan is not so much intended to restate standard operating procedures.

We apply for grants, we do all these things all the time. But with regard to fundraising, I've specifically put in here the naming rights and the valuation of what we have to name because we need to work with the larger city, within the larger city parameters, which many people believe have not necessarily valued accurately some of the city's assets. So we don't wanna undersell what we have because we think we have a pretty great thing. Actually, this item here about developing a donor circle program that complements the RMA's membership program, that item may be reshaped in light of conversations that are going on right now with the RMA. So that it's even more streamlined.

I like your target of a minimum of 1,000 numbers. I know you haven't quite identified levels yet but I like the number.

It should like I say I'm choosing numbers that I think should be very attainable. And then again, working with the museums to five zero one(three)s. When I say support them, of course they both exist to support the museum. Supporting meaning making sure that we work together well, both lines of communication. Fee schedule, we've talked about that.

Everything from admissions to facility rentals, loan fees, all sorts of things. We can't assess any fees until council approves us doing so. And we will have a little retail store in the main museum. It won't be very big but it'll be dynamite. And then sustainability.

We internally have a few sustainability principles listed in some incomplete administrative procedural documents that we need to spend some time with and get all the staff oriented too. We are publicly interpreting the sustainable features of our building. We're working on a sustainability page on the website right now. And then, there'll be little call outs throughout the building for the green building features that we have adopted. The ones that would have earned us a LEED Gold certification if we had paid for certification.

We can go back to any page if you have some notes or comments to advice, like us to rethink our benchmarks, etcetera.

Just the previous page, what is the objective of the donor circle in terms of maybe percentage of fundraising that comes from other sources than the city or whatever that might be?

That's one area where I'm really reluctant to put numbers on it because we have no, for over one hundred years, the city has paid our bills, almost one hundred percent, and we don't have a precedent for knowing how much we can generate through a membership program. We don't even have much of a precedent for establishing a baseline of sponsorship generation or how often we're gonna land a grant, that kind of thing. Because that's not the model on which we've been funded up to now. We're just gonna be doing everything we can to earn more of our own keep because it'll make it possible for us to do more and it's just safer to have to diversify your revenue and we're gonna do it as much as we can but I have no way of knowing what those goals are that we can reasonably expect to achieve. RMA currently has membership And mostly right now, since the number of RMA members is very small, it mostly brings in just enough to cover RMA's business expenses.

So we know that as we ramp up toward reopening the main museum, there's gonna be a lot interest and it will be a perfect time to launch a big membership drive and get a lot of new members, get in now before admission charges, know, those kinds of things. It'll also make sense for us to do this as a jointly branded single effort. So we're moving more and more in that direction and working with the RMA to formalize that.

Thank you, that makes sense.

So, I do appreciate the input that you've provided so far. This is not your only opportunity. You email me individually afterwards if thoughts come to mind. This will move through the processes of approval. The final draft of it will come back to you for your formal approval to recommend it to the city council.

Because the American Alliance of Museums considers a strategic plan to be a core document that every museum accredited should have. It does need to be approved by our governing body, which is the city council. And I wanna get that done in time for day one of this plan, which is July 1. So, thanks again for the input you've provided. Again, tell me if you think of anything else. And the revision will come to you probably at your May meeting to move forward.

Any

other comments or questions? If not, we'll move on. Thank you all for your input. Under communications, have directors update.

And I don't have much to add other than what's in the report since the city clerk changed their rules. We don't actually prepare this report so far in advance. It's only a week or so old. Main things are of course main museum. No big surprises over there anymore.

Nothing we can't They found another piece of concrete underground. So all these things have to be dealt with but I'm hoping that by the March or so we'll be able to share with you if we have to do any formal adjustments to the timeline for the project. One of the more fun discoveries, and stop me if I've mentioned this already, is one of the subterranean tunnel system openings was revealed in the basement. It was revealed in a location where basement restroom, it's a circle, the basement restroom wall was going to run across it. So, they're doing adjustments to the plan now to open and move the walls basically so that the entire five foot bricked in circle will be in the floor of the public restroom in the basement and we'll put a glass floor so you can see it and we'll interpret that too.

Kind of cool.

Yes. The best kind of These

are not tunnels as has been rumored for moving hooch back and forth. They're steam tunnels that were heating all the building stuff. Did you

find the whiskey bottle though?

We found a lot of whiskey bottles on the site, not in the tunnels. The workmen just tossed and kept on building.

Any comments board members on the directors update? I just had one question under your notation under the budget. It says revenue challenges for the city continue which have resulted in some reductions and that's affecting you as well. Correct.

And the reductions are to our proposed budgets not taking away what we have now. Largely what it means is deferred hires. Okay.

Any other questions or comments? If not, we'll receive and file this report thank you I don't have any reports do you rich

just a couple quick things

good

one is I visit the Huntington Library a couple of weeks ago. And I saw an exhibit there, Historias Verdacallis, which were Chicano prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was an exhibit on Chicano printmaking as a tool for resistance, community building, and cultural reclamation since the nineteen

sixties. It

was really powerful. If you have a chance, it's closing on Monday. It's really, really good. In other words, roughly 60 works by 40 different artists and collectors tracing pivotal moments in American history driven by Chicano resistance. Of course, the formation of the UFW United Farm Workers and other struggles around identity, borders, and social justice. I just thought it was really, really well done and I could see us doing something along those lines sometime here. Deep

in our history, long before the Cheech was a glimmer in anyone's eye, we did have a Chicano art exhibition at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum from Cheech's collection. We had And

the other thing I have is, as you all know, this is my last board meeting. So, I want to thank the board members, first of all. Especially, Cynthia and Sharon for your leadership. Both did great jobs. Peggy, of course, is just a real dynamo. Luce as well. Julia, I've only known you for your time. Know you did a great job. Anna, I got your email today. So, yes, let's keep in touch.

Finally, I just want to say and Peggy said this last time, but I really appreciate meeting and working with the extremely talented and committed staff. It's just amazing. What you've done and what you're now doing keeps the museum and its affiliated properties thriving. And it's been nothing short of miraculous. The fact that you pulled up a 100 events in one year, so it was just amazing. Yeah. It was amazing. And you've done all this while the main museum has been dark. Okay? Robin, you've just been the leader of the museum as needed.

And I'm going to continue to be engaged, I think you know that, in numerous ways. I look forward to opening both the Museum and the Herana Museum. Thank

you.

Yes. On behalf of the board we thank you for your years of service Rich. They've been great. Thank you.

You're here.

And any other brief reports on conferences? Meetings, seminars attended by our board members?

I just wanted to add that the Riverside Art Museums or CHEECH, the show there really resonates with the printmaking show. It's Chicano photography from the sixties until now and it's a really impressive show and I also see it as a form of resistance. The use of masking in photography is kind of this really great metaphor that I see playing out a lot in that show so I highly recommend it.

Thank you, Anna. Anyone else? If not, then our meeting is adjourned and thank you all again for coming.