Representatives of the Great Lakes Aquarium hope to insert a straw into surplus tourism taxes collected by the city of Duluth in 2015.
The attraction will seek an additional $200,000 on top of the $360,000 it was budgeted to receive in 2015, to help fund a new permanent exhibit called “The Amazing World of the Unsalted Seas.”
Aquarium officials will make their pitch to the Duluth City Council next week.
Jack LaVoy, the aquarium’s executive director, believes he can make a strong case for the investment, which will leverage a project that’s expected to cost $726,500 in all.
The aquarium already has been awarded a $250,000 appropriation from the state’s Legacy Fund. LaVoy plans to use $201,500 from the aquarium’s own operating budget to support the project and aims to raise an additional $75,000 from outside sources to match that Legacy Fund grant. If the city chips in $200,000, the budget for the project could be fulfilled.
“To bring $250,000 from the state into this building and then match it with some of our money and hopefully with some of the city’s surplus tourism tax money, and put local contractors and electricians and local plumbers and local artisans to work, making this building an even better visitor experience, that seems to me a pretty good use of money,” LaVoy said.
Duluth is expected to finish 2015 with a tourism tax surplus of about $530,000, said David Montgomery, the city’s chief administrative officer. He said the city administration supports the aquarium’s request, especially as the operation continues to earn acclaim for recent exhibits, as well as attracting more visitors and more outside grant money.
By developing the exhibit mostly in-house, using local fabrication and development expertise, Sarah Erickson, the aquarium’s director of education, expects to hold the cost of the project in check.
“We’re producing these exhibits for about one-third the cost of hiring an external design firm to do the whole shebang,” she said.
The proposed exhibit would focus on Earth’s 253 largest lakes, including Lake Superior, which together hold more than two-thirds of the planet’s freshwater. It would feature hands-on interactive exhibits, as well as two live animal displays, including a sturgeon touch pool and a cichlid tank.
The project would open up a harbor view from the aquarium that had not previously been accessible to most guests.
“Because of the way we have designed this exhibit, with a low profile, it will afford people something you don’t find in any other Midwest city - the ability to see large commercial vessels passing by the window at really a close-up distance. So it really connects what we’re doing in this building with the working harbor outside,” LaVoy said.
LaVoy wants to have the exhibit ready to open by August of next year, in time for the Tall Ships Duluth festival.
“That gallery is going to have such a panoramic view of the harbor that it’s going to be a real magnet for people who want to come and have this freshwater Great Lakes experience and to be able to view the boats,” he said.
Already, the aquarium boasts that it is the most-popular paid visitor attraction in Duluth, and the operation is on pace to record an annual attendance of more than 135,000 guests, the highest mark it has reached since 2002.
“We’d probably have to close down in order to not exceed 135,000 people,” LaVoy said Thursday.
In 2008 - the first full year after LaVoy took the helm at the aquarium - its annual attendance was 104,000 people. Since then, its traffic has grown by nearly 30 percent.
Visit Duluth figures that the average daytime visitor to Duluth spends about $104, and LaVoy said it would follow that the aquarium’s attendance gains would equate to about an additional $3.2 million in spending.
“We feel we’re a very good investment for the city,” said Allison Iacone, the aquarium’s communication coordinator. “As we grow in size, we have grown in attendance and as a draw. We feel that we have provided the city with a great return on its investment, and we hope to continue to do that.”
Erickson said the proposed exhibit is the most ambitious project the aquarium has yet undertaken.
The permanent exhibit would be the largest in the aquarium, boosting the facility’s total exhibit space by nearly 3,500 square feet.
