Harold s views accurate, let s see a charge for art gallery

Harold Jones views in his letter Weekend Sun 4 June are very accurate. If the same occurs with the proposed museum as occurred with the TCC Art Gallery ie Once the museum is established it becomes TCC controlled and run, any private funding will disappear as benefactors will not be prepared to pour hard earned cash into council coffers to see it frittered away.
TCC (councillors and administration past and present) do not appear to have the required business acumen to run any project they create or are involved with at a profit eg The Stadium, Baywave. It is always the ratepayers who are burdened with the task of bailing the council out and picking up any loss. The manager of the TC Art Gallery announced (proudly) this week that “19,000 school children had visited the gallery” and it had hosted “more than 140,000 visitors”. Presumably these numbers have been since the gallery opened.
Being a little mercenary (and an organisation like this should be, if it is being run as a business, especially now it is in the red to ratepayers to over $140,000) it should be looking at ways and means of reducing this amount and to support itself rather than relying on continued injections of funds from ratepayers.
If these 140,000 visitors had each paid $5 entry fee and the 19,000 school children $1 this would input $719,000.
I know the arguments from the arty crowd against charging will be “If we charge an entry fee the public will not come” and “Other galleries in NZ and Australia don’t charge’. These arguments are utter nonsense, for if individuals are keen enough to visit an exhibition they will be prepared to pay a small entry fee.
You cannot get much for $5 these days so it is pretty minimal.
Classicflyersnz museum at Mount Maunganui charges $10 an adult entry fee and have no complaints and no lack of visitors.
Let’s see an entry charge of $5 per person introduced for the TC Art Gallery to at least improve its financial standing and assist it moving out of the red.
Roger Bailey, Papamoa Beach.