In his final executive action as mayor of Aberdeen on Wednesday evening, Pete Schave disbanded the city’s Board of Museum and History five years after it was established to guide the city’s museum back from the ashes of a 2018 fire, culminating a pattern of misalignment between the mayor and advisory body.

Schave provided the official notice at the end of his mayor’s report on Wednesday.

“I haven’t seen any strategy or heard any plans from the museum board on how they would like to proceed with the museum other than day to day discussions,” Schave said. “Not to take anything away from that board, they all had great vision, and they all try to make things happen. It’s my feeling that we got the cart a little bit ahead of the horse. City staff have taken the lead on pretty much the entire process.”

He continued, “At this point in the development of the new museum building, I think it is in the city’s best interest to disband the museum board until there are further developments in the museum’s renovation.”

Volunteers are working to catalogue inventory at the city’s downtown building on Wishkah Street, which the city purchased for $350,000 in 2022 as the future home of its Museum of History. George Donovan, who chaired the recently-disbanded museum board, said the momentum toward opening the city’s museum is “at its most positive state it’s been at since the fire,” and the city has money from a Capital Heritage Grant to hire a manager to lead renovation plans at the building.

Former Aberdeen Mayor Erik Larson reinstated the board in 2018 after a fire destroyed the city’s armory building and much of the collection inside of it. As an advisory body, the board was charged with “developing plans and programs for the preservation of the historical heritage of the city and the surrounding area,” according to a city ordinance.

That ordinance also created a “museum and history fund.” The board had the authority to apply for gifts and grants to develop the city’s collection, but any expenditures had to be approved and appropriated by the city council.

When Schave took over in 2019, he “kept the museum board intact in hopes that they would create strategies to get the museum back up and running,” he said at Wednesday’s council meeting. “Anytime we talked about funding for that there was lots of grants available, but nothing ever really evolved.”

According to Stacie Barnum, the city’s parks and recreation director who also manages the museum board, the city’s museum fund currently has about $416,000.

“Mayor Schave’s decision to suspend the board will allow the new mayor and the city council to discuss and make decisions about how they’d like to move forward with the museum,” Barnum said in an email. “Without an operating museum at this time it makes sense to suspend the board and reevaluate.”

Similarly to his Wednesday announcement, Schave, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, told The Daily World in 2021 that the museum board had not accomplished much. But members of the now-disbanded board feel that any lack of progress was because the museum project was never a priority for the city.

John Shaw, who served on the board since its inception, called the decision to disband the museum board “nothing more than a poorly-veiled vendetta against the museum board in an effort to shift focus from the lack of support for moving forward with the history museum. If the mayor had wanted any of these things to move forward, they could have.”

Shaw cited pushback from the board to city decisions regarding a $23 million insurance settlement the city received after the museum fire, specifically the handling of $2 million in collections derived from the value of the museum items that burned.

“Over the years, major steps that we’ve taken to the city have been denied and stopped over various concerns, and most of it is the lack of commitment by the city,” he said

Eight people served on the board, including one city council seat, filled by Deborah Ross.

“We did have a very talented board,” said Donovan, the board chair. “We had people that knew what they were doing there, had very good ideas, and basically got shot down all the time.”

In an interview on Thursday, Douglas Orr, who was sworn in as mayor of Aberdeen and will take over at the first meeting in January, said he supports Schave’s decision to disband the board but that he planned to offer its members to stay involved with the museum process.

In that process, Orr said, he would like to more heavily involve the Friends of the Aberdeen Museum group, a nonprofit. Orr recently resigned from his position as a member-at-large on the Friends of the Aberdeen Museum Board, following his election as Aberdeen mayor.

The group’s treasurer, Nancy Cuyle, said volunteers from the Friends have been the main workforce cataloguing the inventory at the new museum building, and in September hosted a 40th anniversary party for the museum there.

The Friends of the Aberdeen Museum formed in 1976 and ran the museum from when it opened in 1983 until the fire.

Cuyle said she hoped to continue working with members of the disbanded Board of Museum and History.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.