In the short term, Autry officials said, the Autry is likely to spend from $500,000 to $1 million to sustain the Southwest's operations in 2003.
Although museum officials are making no guarantees about the historic but bedraggled Southwest building on Mt. Washington, Gray said, "the goal is to have it operate in a public way," while acknowledging that renovating the aging structure might cost $10 million.
For any expansion in Griffith Park, the Autry will need city approval. In recent years, the Los Feliz Improvement Assn., an organization of residents near the park, has been wary of projects that could bring substantial new traffic to the area.
Those and many other details of the museums' union will be worked out in a "due diligence and planning process" that will include solicitations of public input over coming months, Gray said.
Under current plans, the two museums will continue to have separate curators and docents, managing their own collections and exhibitions. They would be free to lend items to each other -- which the two have already been doing for years, officials noted.
The Southwest Museum, founded in 1907, has for the last decade suffered through a series of leadership crises. In 1993, former Director Patrick Houlihan was convicted of removing about 20 valuable baskets, tapestries and paintings from the museum's renowned Native American collection and secretly selling or trading them.
The Southwest's current need for financial help was made clear by a report commissioned a year ago. The confidential report, a draft of which was obtained by The Times, was undertaken by Daniel Belin, an attorney and nonprofit management consultant. It found that the museum's trustees were contributing too little money, paying too little attention to finances and consequently squandering their credibility among other potential donors.
The report also sounded out alliance possibilities with representatives of several other cultural organizations -- including the Autry, the casino-rich Pechanga Indian tribe in Riverside County, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.Except for the Autry and the Pechangas, most expressed doubts about the cost and logistics of preserving the collection, its current site and the institution's independence.
