Save the Randall Museum

TAKE A LOOK at the Presidio, where George Lucas is building a monstrosity of a private office complex in what ought to be a national park. Then take a stroll through the San Francisco Zoo, where admission is expensive, there's plenty of money for an upscale café and visitor shops, and the director gets a nice salary – but the elephants are dying, and the orangutan is stuck in a nasty concrete bunker. And swing by the Golden Gate Park Music Concourse, where construction crews are demolishing historic pedestrian tunnels to make way for a needless underground parking garage.

That's the model for what will happen if the city agrees to privatize the Randall Museum.

As Sean McCourt reported last week ("Giving away the Museum," 4/21/04), the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission is considering turning over the popular center for children's art and science programs to the private Randall Museum Friends, which argues (as do all privatization proponents) that it can run the place more efficiently.

That's nonsense. Every single time the city has turned over a public facility to private interests, the results have been disastrous. The Randall, a city facility since 1951, is a treasure to the thousands of families who go there every year. Admission is free, and special events are cheap.

Sure, budget cuts are hitting the museum – but that's no excuse to privatize it. This amounts to a theft of public property, and once these city facilities are gone, it's hard to get them back. The private management groups meet in secret, can make financial decisions (like charging admission) without public input, and have no community accountability.

The Rec and Park Commission is pushing this thing through quietly, but the Board of Supervisors needs to get involved and tell the department that the Randall is public property, now and forever.

Randall Museum Friends holds a public forum Sun/2, 4 p.m., Randall Museum, 194 Museum Way, S.F. (510) 482-3553. The Recreation and Park Commission holds a hearing on the privatization plan May 5, 2 p.m., City Hall, Room 416, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Pl., S.F.