Faced with falling attendance and sagging revenue, Long Beach aquarium officials suffered a setback Friday when Gov. Gray Davis gave the struggling tourist attraction a fraction of the $2.4 million in state aid they had been seeking.
Aquarium of the Pacific's supporters, who once promised the facility would require no public funding, now say the state money is necessary to help cover operating costs and free up other money to make interest payments to bondholders.
But Davis on Friday approved only $500,000, heightening the scramble by aquarium officials to save money and find other public and private financing.
"We are thankful for the $500,000," said Warren Iliff, aquarium president and chief executive officer. "It would have been nice to have gotten more. The outlook is good, but we will have to work hard and look for new sources of money and ways to save money."
The $120-million aquarium opened in June 1998. Beforehand, top city officials--armed with a feasibility study--forecast that it would draw crowds of 2 million people a year, more than enough to pay for construction, operation and debt service.
The most recent report to aquarium bondholders, however, revealed a less glowing reality: Paid admissions during the busiest months--July through December--fell roughly 40% from 1998 to 1999.
If those trends continue, the numbers indicate, admissions this year may dip below the 1.4 million visitors necessary to meet the aquarium's current annual budget of about $23 million. According to the current estimate by the aquarium, about 1.2 million people will visit the facility in 2000.
Iliff acknowledged Friday the original projections were based on faulty data.
The analysis "used stuff from other aquariums in other regions. It just didn't compare and the extrapolations did not work," he said.
Although the amount of state aid requested and received is rather modest, the attempt to secure government funding has once again stirred local critics who have long opposed the project.
"It's a shame to see it, but the numbers were wrong in the first place," said Joel Friedland, a former Long Beach harbor commissioner. "We are now beginning to reap the effects of those bad projections."
Friedland and others are concerned the aquarium may be headed the way of other Long Beach tourist attractions, including the struggling Queen Mary and the failed exhibit of the Spruce Goose--the gigantic flying boat built by Howard Hughes.
