Transfer of funds stymies the opening of The new Fort Peck Dam Interpretive Center and Museum

The new Fort Peck Dam Interpretive Center and Museum probably won’t open as planned this spring or summer because the Army Corps of Engineers spent a $325,000 chunk of its federal funding elsewhere.

By KAREN OGDEN
Tribune Regional Editor

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/news/stories/20040217/localnews/427049.html

The 18,000-square-foot, $6.7 million building was finished last spring. It was scheduled to open this May as a springboard to what merchants hoped would be an improved tourist season after the long, cold winter the Hi-Line has endured.

Owners of hotels, restaurants and shops were counting on the museum, featuring a life-size cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex, to attract Lewis and Clark Bicentennial tourists to the northeastern corner of the state.

But now the Corps says money to finish the center’s exhibits won’t come through until at least October.

"The people in this area have donated money to get this thing up and running," said Larry Mires, executive director of Glasgow-based Two Rivers Economic Growth.

"…If the building doesn’t open, that’s kind of a real blow and a slap to all the people in northeastern Montana," he said.

Montana’s congressional delegation has fired off letters to the Corps demanding a quick solution.

"Congress specifically appropriated funds … and the money was not available to the interpretive center when they needed the money," U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg said. "To say they’re going to backfill the money at a later date isn’t acceptable. That’s not right."

The $325,000 shortfall was discovered when a local Corps official was about to award a contract to a Minnesota firm to build and install most of the center’s exhibits.

The facility’s centerpiece is a 13-foot-tall, 38-foot-long cast of "Peck’s Rex," an unusually complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil excavated from the badlands near Fort Peck in 1997.

Without the dinosaur and other exhibits, the empty building likely will remain locked for the summer, said Roy Snyder, Fort Peck Lake manager with the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Corps transferred the funds because the museum didn’t use the money in fiscal year ’02, when it was appropriated, said Bill Mulligan, chief of the Corps’ civil works project management branch in Omaha, Neb.

Of $588,000 earmarked for the interpretive center in the ’02 appropriation, only roughly $100,000 was spent that year, Mulligan said.

The Corps transferred $325,000 to the Fort Peck Fish Hatchery and other projects because they were able to use it immediately, he said.

Congress has directed the Corps to transfer money to other projects when it’s not spent in the year it’s appropriated to keep it working, Mulligan said.

There’s no guarantee the Corps can restore the entire $325,000, and funds won’t be available until at least October.

But the Corps will try its best to find the full amount, Mulligan said.

"The Corps of Engineers would love to do nothing better than get a contract awarded and get that interpretive center filled up," Mulligan said. "We don’t want an empty building sitting there either."

But John Rabenberg, board president of the Fort Peck Paleontology, Inc., said the Corps is responsible for the spending delays that led to the money being shifted.

The paleontology group and museum were ready to spend their appropriation in 2002, but the Corps wouldn’t allow it until all of the center’s design work was finished, he said.

Fort Peck Paleontology was never warned that the Corps would transfer the money if it wasn’t spent within the first year, he added.

"It was promised to us and we took the government at good faith," he said.

The money may be available from the budget of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a partner in the interpretive center, said J.P. Donovan, spokesman for Sen. Conrad Burns.

"The money’s not gone; it’s just not available right now," Donovan said. "We’re going to be working with the Fish and Wildlife Service to see if maybe we can get it from a different angle."

Burns is chairman of the Interior Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which controls the purse strings of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"With Conrad being on Interior, he’s in a position to at least get some answers from those folks," Donovan said.

But until the money is secured, it will be an anxious spring for the owners of shops, hotels and restaurants hurt by a bitter cold winter.

"It’s just stupid to have this beautiful facility out there and have it not be opened," said Diane Brandt, co-owner of Sam’s Supper Club in Glasgow. "It’s going to have a lot of impact, and it’s really important after the winter we’ve been going through up here."

With the Peck’s Rex cast as its centerpiece, the center is expected to draw dinosaur buffs from well beyond Montana’s borders. A paleontology exhibit will showcase northeastern Montana’s wealth of dinosaur fossils.

The center will draw a new type of tourist to the region, which traditionally attracts hunters, anglers and campers, Brandt said.

"I think it’s going to open up some new markets for us which is really neat."

But the nonprofit paleontology group building the Peck’s Rex cast for the Corps says the funding delay will halt work and thwart its future fund-raising efforts.

A staff of eight is at work creating two casts of the Peck’s Rex, one to be finished this spring for the grand opening of the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore and the other to be sold to the Corps for the interpretive center.

"If this money doesn’t come through and holds this up, we’ll have to shut our doors," said Rabenberg.

Rabenberg said the group hired employees to prepare fossils for the exhibits on borrowed money and will have to cease work if the congressional appropriation isn’t available.

Sales of the two casts were to help the group pay for its work and to get its future fund-raising efforts off the ground, Rabenberg said.

The group plans to raise money by selling casts of fossils found in the area.

Tuesday U.S. Sen. Max Baucus sent a letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, the Corps’ commanding general in Washington, D.C.

The practice of robbing one project to pay for another is not what Congress intended in earmarking funds for specific projects, Baucus wrote.

"While I understand the Corps is working within tight budget constraints, it just doesn’t make sense to undermine successful, ongoing projects simply because the Corps wants to shift money around for its own purposes," he wrote.

"…We now have a beautiful interpretive center, ready to open this spring to help celebrate the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and if the Corps does not find the rest of that earmark soon, it will have no exhibits," Baucus added. "The thousands of visitors expected to come to Montana for the bicentennial celebration will show up to find an empty building."

Ogden can be reached by e-mail at [email protected], or by phone at (406) 791-6536 or (800) 438-6600.