Nearly a year after he was tapped to salvage Baltimore's foundering children's museum, Alan M. Leberknight gazed out at a sea of young visitors and proclaimed Port Discovery on the road to recovery.
"It's in damn better shape than it was when I came here," said Leberknight, who started at Port Discovery in August, a freshly retired dean of Towson University's College of Business and Economics, replacing Kathy Dwyer Southern as chief executive.
He acknowledged that there's a long way to go before the museum achieves the success its founders envisioned.
Attendance at the museum, which opened 3 1/2 years ago with great fanfare, has decreased steadily. Budget constraints have prompted the elimination of three positions since May, two of them occupied by people who had been with the museum since it opened or nearly that long.
In addition, the museum will cut back its operating hours in September.
Despite its troubles, Douglas L. Becker, Port Discovery board chairman and chairman and chief executive of Sylvan Learning Systems Inc., an international education company based in Baltimore, said the museum is in no danger of closing as did Columbus Center and the City Life Museums, which had operated nearby.
"There is not one moment of consideration about whether we stay open or not," Becker said. "We're open. We'll be open for years. I was responsible for raising $35 million to get Port Discovery open, and I'm committed to do whatever it takes to see that Port Discovery thrives."
Leberknight says the museum has turned a corner and is well on the way toward establishing itself as an attraction that people will want to revisit.
"We've got this place stabilized," he said. "We're turning it. We're going in the right direction."
Crucial to that turnaround is building a repeat clientele, which museum officials plan to do through themed exhibits that would change several times a year. Also crucial is expanding offerings for younger children, particularly those up to age 4. Port Discovery and children's museums across the country are finding that visitor age is declining.
The museum, financed in part by taxpayers, had about 25,000 paid visitors last month, which Becker said exceeds last year's June attendance. Museum officials typically disclose attendance numbers only at the end of the calendar year and do not give monthly breakdowns. But Leberknight said he hopes for 80,000 in attendance in July and August combined.
The success of the summer, with its camping theme "Camp Exploramora," is important because it is the museum's first effort at creating a unifying theme that would change periodically, giving people a reason to return, Leberknight said.
The summer program offers children camplike experiences. A fall theme related to magic and myths will incorporate Harry Potter and Halloween. A spring theme related to globetrotting, with exhibits about different cultures, is being planned, he said.
"This idea of having a theme that plays out through the museum is new, but I think it's a very good idea," said Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the Association of Children's Museums in Washington. "It makes the museum new and fresh. ... I think it's a good strategic idea.
The new direction raises the bar for Port Discovery, Elman said.
"Their visitors are going to continue to expect new and fresh exhibits," she said.
'Tone of panic'
Despite the public optimism, several former employees said Leberknight has painted a grimmer picture of the museum's situation internally, referring to Port Discovery as "a sinking ship," "a baseball game that is about to be lost" and "a book whose final pages are yet to be written and which might not have a happy ending."
"He sets a basic tone of panic for the employees," said Pamela Tamondong, who was associate vice president of visitor services until her job was eliminated in May, four days after she returned from maternity leave. "I think the whole thing is doomed, really."
"We're in big trouble here," Leberknight said during two days of budget meetings in April, according to Tamondong, who said she had worked at the museum since it opened. Tamondong attended the budget meetings while on leave.
Leberknight told employees that the museum must make its summer attendance goals or will not have the cash to operate and will have to close in the fall, she and another former employee said.
"He's said if we didn't improve our attendance, the doors would be closed," said the other former employee, who asked not to be identified.
Leberknight acknowledged using those phrases but said his comments were taken out of context. He used such analogies as warnings, he said, to keep people awake during meetings and to instill a sense of urgency.
"I never, ever leave one of these meetings without saying something like, 'The ship can't sink, and here's what we need to do to fix it,"' he said. "I'm not a pessimist. I'm an optimist."
He said he has worked since his arrival to instill an increased business sense among museum employees.
"I had to make sure they knew that if this continues, the ship could sink," he said. "I have to walk that fence where I create in people a sense of urgency, a sense of responsibility and, at the same time, a sense of optimism and what's possible."
Leberknight doesn't deny the importance of good summer attendance, but he expressed confidence in Port Discovery's immediate future, even if cash runs low.
"I know right now of resources we could tap," he said. "I think we're OK for the next year or so, and that's with nothing going right."
According to Port Discovery's most recent income tax filing, for the fiscal year that ended June 30 last year, the museum earned $3.7 million from such things as ticket sales, overnight programs, memberships, facility rentals and investment income, while contributions and grants added $2.4 million. Expenses were about $6.2 million.
"I would love to be able to say we have as much revenue coming in here as going out," Leberknight said. "Certainly, no organization can last forever if the cash going out is more than the cash coming in. I think we are now making some progress."
But it will take time, and Leberknight said he is not expecting the museum to break even in the fiscal year that just ended. He declined to say whether he expects the loss to be greater or less than last year's.
Recent staffing cuts were part of a planned reorganization, Leberknight said. The number of full-time employees has declined to 42 from 45 when he arrived, Leberknight said.
"We were heavy in staffing when you look at things on a national basis," he said. "It tore me apart here [to announce the elimination of jobs]. But I step back, and I say, 'They pay me to be the president here. I have to be responsible in that job."'
He cut his own salary shortly after assuming his duties in August. He won't reveal the amount, but a source with knowledge of the museum's finances put the reduction at $20,000.
"I said, 'I don't need that much,"' Leberknight said. "That will be my contribution."
Cutting back hours
In September, the museum will trim its hours, allowing it to save on wages paid to part-time staff members. It will close Monday through Thursday during September to clean and repair exhibits. It will be open Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will move its Sunday opening time to noon from 10 a.m.
From October through May, the museum will shave three hours off its Tuesday-through-Thursday schedule, closing at 2 p.m.
Leberknight declined to specify the savings from the shorter hours but confirmed that a source's estimate of $96,000 a year is a good approximation.
Port Discovery was heralded as Baltimore's next great attraction. Situated in the failed Fishmarket entertainment complex, the venture was to be a linchpin in broadening the area's attractions and drawing tourists to the east side.
Founders helped generate excitement by bringing in as the designer Walt Disney Imagineering, which dreams up rides and adventures for Walt Disney Co.
The 80,000-square-foot museum includes educational experiences and exhibits on three levels including a three-story climbing treehouse with crawling tubes and a rope bridge.
As one of the largest children's museums in the country, it was projected to draw 450,000 visitors annually, to generate more than $26 million in sales and receipts, to boost Maryland's economy by at least $14.5 million a year and to generate 600 jobs.
Port Discovery - named one of the top five children's museums in the United States in February by Child Magazine - has yet to achieve its goals.
In 1999, its first full year of operation, the museum attracted 415,000 visitors. The next year, attendance slipped to 313,000 paying customers. Last year's attendance was expected to match 2000's, but the Howard Street tunnel fire in July and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 put attendance even further behind. The museum drew about 268,000 visitors last year.
The museum's falling attendance is reflected in its finances. Admissions generated $1.7 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2000, according to the museum's tax filing. A year later, admissions revenue dipped to $1.3 million. During the same two years, membership fees dipped from $462,973 to $413,137.
Port Discovery hopes to turn around visitor numbers by spending as much as $500,000 to develop more exhibits for young children. The museum's primary focus has been children ages 8 to 12. It has secured about $1.6 million in private pledges toward a $5 million capital improvement project.
Port Discovery's current space dedicated to early childhood is smaller than that of the average children's museum, said Elman of the children's museum association. Across the nation, demand for such space has increased.
"Our members are seeing younger and younger visitors," she said. "With older children, there's simply more competition for their leisure time, their out-of-school time," she said.
The nation has about 300 children's museums, and 80 more are planned, Elman said. It is the fastest-growing category in the museum industry, she said.
Though the Enoch Pratt Free Library closed its Port Discovery branch - a place where museum visitors could hide away with a book or play computer games - this month, the museum will keep the books and develop its own programming, minus the computers.
As Port Discovery tries a variety of methods to boost attendance, its admission fees remain higher than those of most children's museums of comparable size. Tickets are $11 for adults, $8.50 for children ages 3 to 12 and free for children younger than 3.
The average among 26 children's museums of Port Discovery's size was $7.14 for adults and $5.11 for children, according to the Association of Children's Museums. Of those, only the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Fla., has higher fees, charging $13.95 for adults and $9.95 for children.
"Yes, Port Discovery admission fees are at the high end of the range for children's museum fees, but they are sitting in the middle of a tourist destination," Elman said.
Leberknight is aware of Port Discovery's ranking and said the admission prices have been discussed. But there are no immediate plans to adjust them, he said.
He said he was encouraged by last month's attendance and by visitor reaction to Camp Exploramora.
"The camp is the first major thing we're doing to show how we're evolving into what we can be," Leberknight said. "But we can't expect this to be the magic solution. We've got to come back and do it again and again. We've got to create this sense in our visitors that, hey, they did this well, we've got to go back and see what they're doing next."