Lack of state funds threatens Hispanic center
NHCC needs $2M; parent agency receives $300,000
A fire-retardant curtain. Smoke detectors. Fire alarm panels. Structural assessment for the Performing Arts Building.
And heating, ventilation and air conditioning problems throughout the campus.
These are a few items on the National Hispanic Cultural Center’s general capital needs list.
To take care of all of them, the center would need more than $2 million from the state.
Yet the Department of Cultural Affairs received only $300,000 for the needs of the entire department this fiscal year from the Governmental Gross Receipts Tax.
Money from the tax is used for capital emergencies within the DCA. And the department oversees the eight state-run
museums and seven historical sites across the state
For the past year, DCA Secretary Veronica Gonzales has kept the board of directors at each museum abreast of the problems the department is experiencing.
“Each property has its own set of problems we are trying to fix,” Gonzales said. “It’s department-wide.”
As for distribution of the Governmental Gross Receipts Tax-emergency funds, it’s difficult to determine which museum gets what.
“It depends on who has the worst emergency each year,” Rebecca Avitia, NHCC executive director, told the center’s board of directors at its meeting on Aug. 24. “Our capital request is typically about $2 million a year. We’re probably about five years from fixing all the old problems. And (they) are (the result) of many years of deferred maintenance that is causing problems.”
In addition to the state funding, the various sites under the DCA are dependent on private fundraising for their expenses.
At 17 years old, the NHCC is the youngest of the Department of Cultural Affairs properties. It cost $56 million to build and opened on Oct. 21, 2000.
Addressing problem
For nearly a year, Gonzales has addressed the maintenance problems during NHCC board meetings, explaining that budget problems are department-wide — at all levels of the state museums.
In the December meeting, Gonzales told the board that department leadership and the 15 division directors have been meeting to identify solutions to the budget shortfalls.
“All of the directors have come together collaboratively, working across divisions to find efficiencies while enriching our programming,” Gonzales said. “The solutions are to focus on the need to address shortfalls while preserving public service. Still, DCA will have to rely a bit more on our volunteer core and foundation partners.”
According to the DCA, in fiscal year 2017 — which ended on June 30 — 835,135 people visited the state’s eight museums. That is down about 7 percent from 2016’s tally of 898,381.
The NHCC was the most visited state museum, with 226,793 visitors — an increase of nearly 20 percent since last year. Another museum that had an increase was the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, which had 95,833 visitors. The other five state-run museums — four in Santa Fe and one in Las Cruces — posted decreases.
There’s a reason the DCA gets so little money for emergency repairs: It comes from the Governmental Gross Receipts Tax.
Cultural Affairs currently receives 1 percent from that tax base, which last fiscal year added up to $300,000.
The tax also gives 24 percent to state parks, and then 75 percent goes to the state Department of Finance and Administration.
Gonzales said Cultural Affairs is interested in increasing the percentage it receives from the tax.
A legislative interim committee met with the New Mexico Finance Authority in June, and that’s where Sen. Jacob Candelaria, D-Albuquerque, championed the move for Cultural Affairs to get more of the tax funds.
Gonzales also said in a statement that the funds received from the tax are used for capital improvement.
But the tricky part for DCA is that it is the only state agency to own its properties — each unique in its own right — which also means that it doesn’t receive extra capital funds outside the tax to maintain those properties.
Gonzales also spoke about the projected fiscal year 2019 budget shortfall. The NHCC’s budget from the state is $2.2 million, which covers operational costs and doesn’t include any emergency money.
“It’s significantly impacting the department’s ability to hire for mission-critical core operations,” Gonzales said. “We are in a very dire position department-wide.”
Moving forward
Despite the bleak outlook, Cultural Affairs is working closely with the Finance Authority to appeal to the state Board of Finance and General Services Department for more capital building repair funds.
Since Avitia started at the NHCC in 2014, the center’s staff created a strategic plan to identify the needs of the center.
In recent years, the NHCC has hosted more than 700 events per year and started partnerships within Albuquerque Public Schools and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority to get more students on campus for programming. In doing so, the center’s profile has risen on a national basis, along with revenue and attendance.
“I strongly believe that the center is at the most exciting and vulnerable time, and if the vacancies continue and our budgets go down, we will repeat the cycle that we have just been through,” Avitia told the board. “At this very moment, we will start over or make a leap. We have waited 17 years to get to this point. We are so unstable by the lack of funding and the lack of staff. … The support of the community and the board has never been so important.”
Edward Lujan, NHCC chairman emeritus, who was instrumental in getting the NHCC built in the late 1990s, agreed that something must be done to fix the problems at the NHCC and at Cultural Affairs.
Lujan said the real problem is that daily operations are stretched too thin.
“(The NHCC) is five or six positions down,” he said. “You can’t fill them, and there is only so much you can do. You can’t go from 300 events to 700 to 800 events per year. You hit a saturation point and if those aren’t filled, then we’re going to go down. The staff can’t do much more than they are doing without addition of new people.”
The NHCC currently has 30 employees — 24 of whom are supported by the general fund.
Board member Paul Maestas interjected, “The state is always going to have a tax issue.”
Lujan then compared what the NHCC gets in funds to the staterun museums in Santa Fe, which get more funding, though attendance there has dropped.
“Museums in Santa Fe are getting much more money, by far,” Lujan said. “We have more buildings, more activities and events. The balance isn’t there. The budgets for DCA are based on performance. That’s the only department that gets performance-based budgets. I don’t care how you slice it, the performance at the NHCC is way above the others.”
Avitia encouraged the board members to think of ideas to help get the word out to the community — all of whom are potential donors.
“Back in the late 1990s, this community chose to have the NHCC,” Avitia said. “Right now, this community needs to decide ‘Does it choose to still have it?’ Because otherwise, we can be an Albuquerque Hispanic Center. But if we choose to be a National Hispanic Cultural Center, we can have it. We can finish building the vision.”
Christopher Saucedo, NHCC board president, told members that a discussion needs to happen immediately for ideas to raise funds.
“I think we need to have a focus strategy and it needs to be directed to the right people or groups of people,” Saucedo said. “We do need to move on this quickly.”