With all the turmoil at San Diego City Hall, wouldn’t it be nice if an unsettling controversy were being worked out cordially and productively? That’s the case with the San Diego Children’s Museum, where all sides are talking and misunderstandings are being put in the past. Children’s Museum directors had the dickens scared out of them last month, believing that the Centre City Development Corp. would really shut down the project if by May 12 that $8 million-or-so gap to fund the $21 million project wasn’t closed. While the pressure is still on the Children’s Museum board and the citizens of San Diego to identify the donations and close the gap, CCDC appears poised to extend the deadline constructively.

“We all believe that a Children’s Museum in Downtown would add significantly to the educational and cultural fabric of San Diego,” says attorney Victor Vilaplana, a director of CCDC. “We recognize that these are difficult times for fund-raising but we hope that the importance of this project for our children and the sheer beauty of its design will be compelling reasons for people to give. I think that CCDC will do everything in its power consistent with its responsibility as a fiduciary of public assets to help the museum undertake its best efforts to the make the museum a reality.”

Rendering shows a section view of the San Diego Children’s Museum.

Senior Vice President Pam Hamilton, the chief negotiator for CCDC, regrettably was singled out for unusually harsh criticism here last month. Hamilton has worked on the Children’s Museum project since 1993, longer than any current director or employee of the Children’s Museum. Among her most difficult jobs, from time to time, is to serve as CCDC’s enforcer, especially of deadlines. There are good reasons for the May 12 deadline, and while it likely will be extended, extensions cannot be indefinite and the fund-raising cannot take forever. And yes, an official enforcer can do her job of emphasizing the need to get the job done ASAP without her sincerity being questioned when she says: “The best option is for the citizens of San Diego to rally behind what is a wonderful institution. The old museum was wonderful; it was funky in a warehouse. The new museum design is fabulous. San Diegans need to rally behind it.”

And they are! Kay Wagner, executive director of the Children’s Museum, says donations are arriving at a brisker-than-ever pace, usually small ones, but greatly appreciated. At an April 20 fundraising party in the El Cortez’ splendid Don Room, Julia Simms, Peter Dennehy and Eric Jones, representing the Building Industry Association and its BIA Cares for Kids program, handed Wagner a check for $50,000 in what they described as a first installment in a challenge campaign among Downtown housing builders first, then among suburban builders as well. The Children’s Museum belongs to all residents of San Diego County, not just the inner-city families, but especially is a “no brainer” for Downtown developers, says Dennehy of the Sullivan Group, which represents five Downtown builders. Easy for him to call it a “no brainer,” the same phrase used by Bob Kelly at the San Diego Foundation regarding a portion of the fund-raising campaign.

We resemble that remark.

Dennehy says he and Jones may persuade Sherm Harmer and the Downtown Residential Marketing Alliance to ride to the rescue.

Malin Burnham is still counseling behind the scenes. Esther Burnham still serves on the museum’s advisory board. Oh, guess who showed up at the Don Room? Dan and Phyllis Epstein, who’d just given $500,000 to the Rady School of Business at UCSD. Oh, and Jill Vivanco, American Assets and Ernest Rady, who bought the NBC and SBC buildings on Broadway last year, just hosted the KidZest Family Arts Day at Horton Square, raising thousands of dollars more.

Ted Roth signed on board. He’s co-chairing fund-raising with wife Jeanne, who serves on the Children’s Museum board, for too long probably. Harold Small was there; the museum’s founding president seemed to enjoy hearing the current president assure that a wall of fame near the entrance to the new Children’s Museum would pay tribute to the founders.

Pam Hamilton was at the event, as was her husband Jim Lester; Peter Hall, too, and Victor Vilaplana. CCDC Chairman Hal Sadler paced in the back while the museum president made his remarks. “Pam’s worked on this project longer than anyone in this room,” he says. “After all you’ve done for San Diego, Pam, you really don’t deserve such grief.” There were sighs of relief.

Street view of the San Diego Children’s Museum plan.

Landscape architect Marty Poirier was there. The Children’s Museum has paid some $187,000 in design fees for the Children’s Museum Park, which turns Island Avenue into a plaza reaching over the triangle to the Martin Luther King Promenade. CCDC has budgeted $1.5 million for park development, representing the lion’s share of its entire investment in the combined park and museum project. Once built, the museum has agreed to maintain it. “The park will truly provide a setting to extend the museum activities into the outdoor, street life of San Diego,” says Poirier. (Please see Poirier’s design and annotation on Page 66.)

Rob Wellington Quigley was there, too, of course. If you’ve never seen his virtual reality tour of the Children’s Museum, send in for a DVD or CD, or look for it at any upcoming Children’s Museum fund-raising event. You probably missed Lynn Schuette’s art auction at the grand opening of Hotel Solamar on lower Sixth Avenue May 4; all proceeds are going to the museum. (Schuette is the museum’s new deputy director; her vision of the museum’s serious art mission is on Page 65.)

(For your own copy of the Children’s Museum virtual reality tour, please send at least $20 payable to the San Diego Children’s Museum, 211 W. Maple St., San Diego, CA 92103. Please designate DVD or CD ROM format.)

Gingerlilly Lowe-Brisby, a teacher, and Phil Beaumont, the principal of the Children’s Museum Charter School, also were mingling at the El Cortez. They’re especially proud because their students’ aggregate API score of 825 came in 132 points above the state average. The highly regarded faculty teaches 80 students in Grades 3 through 6, with room to expand in the new museum and a waiting list to get in. (Please see the related story on Page XX.)

So everyone is mostly getting along and refreshing their understanding of the museum, its missions, its architecture, and coming to grips with the complexities and urgency of the deal. It is mostly a privately funded effort, and most of the private proceeds have come from Vancouver developer Mike DeCottiis, whose Pinnacle Development company paid $11.9 million to the museum for the property at Market and Union streets. He’s building 182 condos, has sold out reportedly at an average $1 million each. Some $4.5 million of the museum’s proceeds from DeCotiis were paid to CCDC to pay for the block, on top of earlier rent payments. That fiduciary responsibility Vilaplana was talking about involves CCDC’s protection of its public investment in the adjacent park, its responsibility, acting for the city’s Redevelopment Agency, to assure that the museum parcel meets a “redevelopment purpose” and to develop that purpose should the museum not proceed. The $10 forfeiture clause was designed to prevent the museum from speculating on the property, not because CCDC is looking for a windfall at the museum’s or Pinnacle’s expense. After 12 years of working with the Museum as it relocated into Downtown from La Jolla Village Square, rented the block, lined up a competent developer — so what if he isn’t Nat Bosa, who wasn’t responsive to the RFP – and working with the museum as it bought the block and sold it to the developer, the last thing Pam Hamilton wants is to take the Children’s Museum parcel away for $10, Hamilton assures.

Can you see why she’d be a little frustrated with the Children’s Museum for not closing the $8 million gap already? Can you appreciate the need to physically seal the half-built Children’s Museum site from moisture and secure it from trespassers? That’s a drag. Costs money. It isn’t what the condo buyers, the first of whom will move in late this year, would have preferred. And it isn’t a state of incompletion that anyone wants to see remain for 12 months or more. It’s an 18-month building project, meaning the museum could be open late next year if the right donors step forward immediately. Nearly all the permits have been secured, but building codes do change with time, another big reason to avoid delay.

While it has been operating its charter school in temporary space and a “Museum Without Walls” program that has taken arts education to more than 58,000 children this year alone, a new museum completion by year-end 2006 means the institution would indeed be without walls for some 48 months, too long for a city as large as San Diego to be without an arts museum for children. Wagner often says San Diego is the nation’s largest city currently without a children’s museum. That’s bad.

Rendering of the interior section at the Children’s Museum.

Nice to see so many people working to turn it around.

CCDC staff has asked the museum board to fire up its fund-raising activities and name the heavyweight “individuals who have joined the effort as members of the board, advisory committee or capital campaign committee, who have a proven track record of serving effectively on other boards and committees where a major capital campaign was delivered,” and to submit such documentation, called “deliverables,” by June 15. “The fund-raising plan would include interim milestones of what amount of new contributions would be realized by what dates between now and July 1, 2006,” Hamilton advises, essentially proposing the demanding terms of an extension.

Dang, that’s a long time to wait to resume construction on the museum parcel, although still not a lot of time to raise $8 million more, strictly through private donations and foundation grants. That’s why civic leaders should indeed discuss various financing alternatives. Maybe the private donors could challenge the public sector for matching dollars. There’s a lot of equity to be leveraged from that $11.9 million property and the museum’s $1.8 million in cash and entitlements in hand, and servicing debt or paying rent are certainly reasonable expenses out of the museum’s estimated $3 million annual revenues when operations resume. The museum staff, directors, members and donors have invested a lot already and can do better. Perhaps, so can the public sector.

“We want the Children’s Museum to be there and always have,” says Hamilton. “That’s the best use of the parcel.”

Amen. Now what’s the fastest way to resume construction without waiting a full year for donations to fill 100 percent of the remaining need?

The saga continues, cordially. If we take much longer, we can call it the San Diego Grandchildren’s Museum.