$18m museum under the pump

INQUIRY: Napier's $18 million MTG building is to undergo a review, which is to include its proposed treatment of Maori taonga. PHOTO/FILE

A wide-ranging review of Napier's new Museum Theatre Gallery (MTG) Hawke's Bay facility will include looking at the most appropriate place to store the museum's Maori artefacts, the city's mayor says.

Issues over a lack of exhibit storage space at the $18 million building came to light last month and have prompted a review initiated by the council's chief executive, Wayne Jack.

The MTG was initially promoted as a facility capable of housing the Hawke's Bay Museums Trust's entire $45 million collection, but documents released by the council this week confirmed council staff and councillors learnt that would not be the case in 2012.

As well as there being an issue of the facility having limited space to house the entire collection, a June 2012 letter from project architects Opus raised the issue of it being inappropriate to store Maori taonga near the building's sewage pipes, which run through part of the museum's basement storage area.

The letter discusses museum staff's preference for storing taonga at another location because there were "cultural reasons" to keep the artefacts away form sewage pipes.

"We will always store the taonga safely, securely, with absolute full respect for the wishes of Maori," Mayor Bill Dalton said yesterday.

"How we do that is something we're working on through this review."

MTG director Douglas Lloyd Jenkins said the museum "wouldn't ever think about" storing taonga near sewage pipes.

He said the MTG had not yet developed a specific plan for where taonga would be stored but "when that plan is developed there is no question that it was going to be anywhere near pipes".

"Any museum in the world is going to have some sort of pipes running through its collection store but the minute they become sewage pipes you know that taonga Maori can't go anywhere near them.

"We would never break that rule. We understand that. It's just something we would never have done."

Mr Jack said the basement storage was also not appropriate for taonga for access reasons.

"The location down there doesn't provide reasonable access to the collection because the taonga get visited by a large number of Maoridom, sometimes up to 70 people, and you can't take 70 people down to that area," he said.

"So to me it's not an issue. There will be another location, whether it be on-site or off-site, where the taonga can be stored."

Mr Jack said he was pushing for the independent review to be completed by the end of this month or early next month.

Mr Dalton said: "We've built a magnificent $18 million building which simply needs a few fine tweaks to make it work."