MFA cuts

By Geoff Edgers
Globe Staff

Reeling from the recession, the Museum of Fine Arts today laid off 33 workers, about four percent of its staff, and announced it will freeze salaries across the board in next year’s budget. The cuts are meant to contain costs as the museum readies for a massive building project set to be completed in 2010.

Along with the 33 staffers laid off, the MFA won’t fill 21 vacant positions – bringing the total cuts to 54 positions. After the reductions, the MFA will employ 756 workers, 577 of them fulltime. Along with the frozen salaries, Director Malcolm Rogers, his four deputy directors and the dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts have taken voluntary pay cuts. The cuts will create a savings of $6 million for the fiscal year 2010 budget. The MFA budget for the museum’s most recent fiscal year, 2008, was $54.9 million.

“We’ve known for several months that we had to look at cost cutting in all possible ways but we thought very seriously about taking our time,” said Rogers in an interview today. “One of the critical things is not to overreact in difficult circumstances.”

The MFA's endowment has declined about 30 percent since last June to about $359 million. And Rogers said the MFA has been particularly hard hit in its shop and fundraising. Twenty of the 33 laid off workers came from those two departments. Retail revenue is down from $7.6 million in FY’2007 to $7.36 million in FY’2008. No figures were available for the current fiscal year but the numbers are expected to fall. Membership at the MFA is also down, from 76,000 in 2008 to its current 70,000 members. The museum is still on track to open a dramatic expansion next year, he said.

“This allows the museum to remain stable through the rest of this year and the rest of next year,” said Rogers, who announced the cuts to museum staff in a 4:30 p.m. meeting.

Museums across the country have been hit hard by the recessions, with cuts coming recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Detroit Institute of Arts and Denver Art Museum. The Art Institute of Chicago recently increased its admission price from $9 to $18.

“This is a terrible, terrible time for arts organizations across the country,” said Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in New York. “Lots of very generous people are really focusing whatever giving they can manage on basic human services: Food, shelter, health care. Arts organizations often get left out.”

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com