Big Island museum forced to curtail plans
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
HILO, Hawai'i — Plans for what will be the largest museum on the Big Island are being scaled back after millions of dollars in federal financing were trimmed from the project.
Kevin Dayton • The Honolulu Advertiser
George Jacob, project director for the Mauna Kea Astronomy Education Center, said this week's scheduled groundbreaking at a nine-acre site near the University of Hawai'i-Hilo was delayed because of the cuts.
The center will easily still be the largest museum on the Big Island, George Jacob said.
"We wanted to get a clearer picture of the budget numbers, especially with the funding cut," Jacob said.
Floor space has been reduced substantially, and some of the high-tech elements of the exhibits have been scaled back.
Jacob said he is unsure why the cuts were imposed, attributing the reduction to general cutbacks at the federal level.
The 49,000-square-foot education center, featuring a planetarium, will focus on the advances in astronomy unfolding at the world's most sophisticated collection of telescopes atop Mauna Kea, blending scientific themes with exhibits on Hawaiian culture and legends. The center will be bilingual, with material presented in English and Hawaiian.
Although the groundbreaking was postponed, the center is expected to open on schedule in mid-2005, drawing an estimated 250,000 visitors a year.
NASA and the federal General Services Administration have released about $19 million for the project, and education center officials had asked NASA to release an additional $10 million this year to cover the remaining construction costs, staff salaries and overhead.
Instead, only $3.6 million was released, Jacob said. The center will continue to seek more federal money as well as private donations, but the curb on federal financing prompted the center to think smaller, he said.
The dome on the planned $4 million planetarium was reduced from about 59 feet across to 54 feet, with the number of seats reduced and some special effects eliminated to hold the cost to $3.5 million, Jacob said.
Plans for a planetarium floor display that would have mimicked the clouds that usually encircle the summit of Mauna Kea had to be scrapped, he said.
About $1 million is being trimmed from the budget for the main building, which will now cost $14 million. To do that, planners had to reduce the main exhibit hall from 21,000 square feet to 17,000 square feet, put plans for a 200-seat outdoor amphitheater on hold, and defer some landscaping for the site.
Taking the biggest hit was the budget for the center's elaborate, high-tech exhibits, which was slashed from $10 million to less than $6 million, Jacob said.
For all of that, the center will easily still be the largest museum on the Big Island, he said.
The redesign effort was done with an eye toward possible expansion and addition of new features as more money becomes available later.
Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.
