Museum director Dr Ian Griffin made the comment yesterday when he said the Dunedin facility was struggling to keep up with expenses, and if it continued, jobs and galleries could be on the line.
"The museum is facing a pretty big financial crisis in the next year or so.
"The pressure is on us to raise more, or have collection pieces fall into disrepair, close galleries, or offer less education to school children."
To help, he announced it would be increasing its prices for entry to the Science Centre and planetarium by up to $5 per person, from April 3.
"This was not something
that we wanted to do, but unfortunately our hand has been forced.
"The levy we get from the councils has not been keeping pace with inflation.
"It’s getting to a situation now where we really need to increase the prices, just to make ends meet."
"We’re running a major museum on, relatively speaking, a small amount of public money, and our business model means that we have to generate income to keep the museum going.
He said levy funding was for core operations of the museum, and keeping entry to the public galleries free.
The Science Centre, including its Tropical Forest butterfly enclosure, and planetarium, were entirely self-funded, and attracted about 70,000 visitors annually.
Like the museum shop and venue hire, the centre’s profits helped offset the museum’s operating costs, such as providing education programmes for school children and schools around the region and the care for more than 1.5million objects in its collection.
"The museum houses over a million nationally significant objects and specimens ... yet receives no government funding to help us maintain these items.
"We also provide support to all the smaller, regional museums in Otago and Southland, to help them maintain their collections."
Dr Griffin said it was not fair to ask the region’s councils to provide more support through levies.
He believed it was time for the Government to step up and support the museum.
"We’re blessed with these incredibly rich collections.
"There are very few moa eggs left in the world, and we’ve got at least three of them here.
"It seems to me that it’s really out of proportion that we should expect a very small ratepayer base of about 50,000 people in our community, to support this incredible wealth.
"They can’t — it’s simply too much — so I do think that there’s a special case for this museum to be supported somehow through national funding."
He said he would be making "very strong representations" to Government and other politicians over the next few months.
"We also need to be recognised as a major tourism asset for the city," he said.
"The museum’s just done an [independent] economic and social impact survey, and that demonstrated that pre-Covid, we were bringing in just under $25million a year, to the local economy.
"We’re a major employer — more than 100 staff — and the rattle-on effect of that is that there are more than 300 jobs in the community that ultimately depend on the museum.
"The Government needs to recognise the importance of museums like Otago Museum and figure out ways of helping fund the shortfall that we have."
