This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: The Missouri History Museum plans to hire an interim director to oversee daily operations for the rest of the year until a permanent successor to Robert Archibald can be found.
The joint budget committee of the museum trustees and its subdistrict commissioners, meeting at the museum on Tuesday, approved a suggestion from John Roberts, head of the board of trustees, that the interim director be hired at a salary of $85 an hour, with no benefits. For a job that is expected to be 20 hours a week, starting June 1, the person would be paid about $47,000 through 2013.
Roberts said he and Romondous Stover, who heads the subdistrict board, have discussed a particular person for the job who is familiar with the operations of the museum. He said the person would have to receive formal approval by trustees and subdistrict commissioners before beginning the job and would not be identified until then.
“I think everybody would be happy with this person if that is the way we go,” Roberts told the committee.
“This person is very familiar with the museum and could help us in a number of different ways.”
Roberts took over as head of the board of the trustees in mid-December, and Archibald resigned about a week later, even though he had signed a contract to remain as head of the museum in 2013.
Since that time, Roberts has been de facto museum president, working with its managing directors. He said he would still handle committee business and relations with the Zoo-Museum District once an interim director is named, but he wanted to relinquish the daily operational duties.
Besides the money for an interim director, the budget committee also discussed other expenditures that had not been in the museum’s budget.
Included were the cost of a consultant for the search for Archibald’s successor, estimated at between $60,000 and $125,000, though Roberts said that cost is probably negotiable; the cost of a compensation consultant to help determine how much the new director would earn, estimated at between $30,000 and $50,000; and the hiring of a public relations consultant at $3,000 a month, beginning June 1, for the remainder of the year.
At Roberts’ suggestion, the committee also voted to pay $7,500 of a disputed invoice for December from the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm, which had charged the museum a discounted rate of $15,000 a month for its services for the last several months of 2012. Roberts said he had had no contact with Fleishman since he took over in the middle of the month, so he thought paying them for half the month would be fair.
Other unbudgeted items coming due are $64,000 for an investigation by former U.S. Attorney Edward Dowd into allegations of improper handling and shredding of documents at the museum; and $42,000 for the museum’s law firm, Bryan Cave, for an unusual amount of time spent on matters concerning the Zoo-Museum District and a hearing by the Board of Aldermen into museum operations and the new operating agreement between the trustees and the subdistrict commissioners.
As part of that agreement, any expenditure not in the budget that exceeds $300,000 must be approved by the budget committee. But Roberts has pledged that committee members would vote on any unbudgeted item, regardless of the amount, and he said that more frequent meetings to go over the budget would help the museum keep closer track of expenses.
Overall, the museum was under budget for the first three months of the year, but committee members noted that the amount resulted in part because of salaries that were less than expected because of the departure of Archibald and others.
Roberts has also promised that even though it does not have to do so by law, the museum would operate under the state’s open meetings law. Because of that pledge, Tuesday’s meeting was postponed from last Friday because even though notice of the meeting was posted as the law requires, the agenda was not included in the posting, as the law calls for, so Roberts determined the meeting should be put off to comply.
As the search process for Archibald’s successor goes forward, Roberts said he wanted to clarify that even though Archibald’s $45,000-a-month consulting contract for the first half of the year calls for him to provide guidance on the selection of a new museum president, he will not actually take part in that process.
At the search committee’s first meeting, last month, trustee George H. Walker had noted that Archibald’s advice and expertise could be valuable to the search, and other committee members appeared to agree. But Roberts emphasized in an interview after Tuesday’s meeting that Archibald would play no part in the search for his successor.