Scattered around the main exhibit at the Greeley History Museum are old irrigation tools, a bullet mold and a dress made out of snakeskin. Together, they tell a story.
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“This is the full history of Greeley,” Laura Cutler, secretary of the nonprofit, Friends of the Greeley Museums, said. “I have lived in the city my entire life, and there's so much that I never knew, and never even thought to look into before.”
The Utopia: Adaptation on the Plains exhibit looks into the city’s founding back in 1870. There are old photographs of how settlers started to make Greeley their own.
“When they first got here, they were living in tents and ramshackle little buildings that they just had to put together once they stepped off the train,” Cutler said.
This is one of a few exhibits in the downtown museum, and one of four museums in the system. Just a few minutes down the street is Centennial Village, an outdoor living history museum. That is where the annual History Fest takes place, where fourth graders go every year to immerse themselves in pioneer life.
Cutler went to History Fest as a child and said it was a core memory for her.
“Seeing the staff just fully dressed up in old garb, getting to actually physically churn butter, seeing these old houses and these beautiful artifacts just blew my mind,” Cutler said. "It was like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
But those experiences could come to an end. Greeley City Council is discussing cutting the museums’ budget by nearly 25%, or roughly $400,000. Some staff members have already been cut, and the recommendation is to rely more on volunteers.
Cutler said the museum might have to reduce hours or limit rotating exhibits. History Fest could feel the cuts as well.
“They're already running on what feels like a skeleton staff. I can see a lot of burnout happening,” Cutler said. “If they aren't able to get enough volunteers, then it would be impossible to hold because that's thousands of kids all in one week.”
While the museums are less than 1% of the city’s total budget, they and other city departments are all taking some sort of hit. Greeley has to address an $18 million deficit that has been growing since the pandemic.
“We just had to do it,” Nathan Mosley, the director of budget and policy for the City of Greeley, said.
Mosley said some of it comes down to numbers. Hundreds of thousands of people use the Family FunPlex, a large local rec center. A small fraction of that go to the museums, around 13,000. It also came down to council priorities, with fire and police taking some of the lowest cuts in the interest of public safety, Mosley said.
“If these are being used this much by the community, how can I strategically distribute the cuts that are needed, and have the least impact or serve the most people that we can with the resources that we have?” Mosley said.
He did hear community concerns this summer. History Colorado even drafted a letter of support to city council expressing concern about the cuts. After some discussion, $60,000 is being added back into the recommended budget for museums specifically.
Mosley believes the public can still enjoy the museums’ core operations for now.
“Our kind of promise to the community is that we're going to work to monitor the impacts and adjust going forward,” Mosley said.
But others, like Randy Graubard, think these cuts are too much. He retired in July after spending 50 years working with kids through teaching history at local Northern Colorado schools and volunteering at Centennial Village.
“You lose your history,” Graubard said. “If we don't know where we come from, how can we figure out where we're going?”
He loved getting to teach rope-making or explain custom home practices from that era – like hanging eucalyptus as an air freshener – at Centennial Village. He also enjoyed watching the “lightbulb” moments, like students seeing a historic photo of a 19th Century house.
“(They say,) ‘Oh, my house looks like this!’ And then they get an idea of how old their house might be,” Graubard said. “To see them connect all that history together in a line and not just, ‘Oh some teacher’s telling me,’ it's so valuable.”
Graubard personally relies on the museum for research about the city. It currently has around 100,000 items from Greeley’s past, many from places that do not exist anymore – like movie chairs from Chief Theatre or religious books from the First Baptist Church. He wants to make sure local history for small towns continues to be preserved.
“Greeley Museums have a reputation all across Northern Colorado of having stuff that you thought may be lost forever,” Graubard said. “It's not something to be cut up lightly.”
Additionally, museum staffing is already tight. The registrar position was removed as part of a voluntary separation agreement. The museum has put a moratorium on taking in new objects.
Chris Bowles, the former Museum Manager, also lost his job this Spring. He said it was due to cutting costs.
“The museum, as a functioning museum, is basically on life support,” Bowles said.
He understands that there are hard decisions ahead, and that other communities are facing this, too. The Loveland Museum has had to raise prices and reduce hours after facing similar budget cuts. There are some bright spots, like Longmont Museums’ grand reopening in mid-October, but it still had to hike admission fees for the first time in 12 years.
He hopes that as the City Council discusses the budget, they will remember that museums are a public service.
“We don't necessarily have to make (a) profit, right?” Bowles said. “We're not there to create wealth and capital for the city. We're there to educate, to make the city a better place.”
The next budget hearing is in October. It should be finalized in November.
