From the New York Times a while ago. Maintaining these great ships as museums take a (no pun intended) a boat load of cash. Its one of the reasons I doubt the USS John F Kennedy will ever become a museum. Maintaining these WW2-sized carriers is tough enough - imagine the up-keep on a super-carrier.
Racing the Clock to Bring Back the Intrepid
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: May 21, 2008
Correction Appended
Getting stuck in the mud on its first attempt to leave Manhattan was not the last or the least of the troubles that the aircraft carrier Intrepid has encountered in the past 18 months.
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Damon Winter/The New York Times
The Intrepid houses a museum that was at risk of going out of business last year, as the costs of overhauling the carrier and rebuilding its home pier rose past $100 million, almost double the original estimate. More Photos »
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The military museum the ship houses was at risk of going out of business last year, as the costs of overhauling the carrier and rebuilding its home pier spiraled past $100 million, almost double the original estimate, said Bill White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. To keep the work going and to stay on schedule to reopen this fall, the museum’s directors borrowed against the museum’s $15 million endowment, a move they had promised never to make, Mr. White said.
“This museum and this whole project was in danger of shutting down,” Mr. White said. “If we hadn’t taken this drastic measure to use the endowment, which I consider sacred, for this purpose, there would be no more Intrepid — unless someone was willing to write a check for 15, 20 million bucks.”
Now, with an electronic timer on a pier on the West Side counting down the days to the Intrepid’s return, museum officials are still pleading for additional public and private financing to complete the renovations on time. On the schedule that the museum set, the ship is due to be towed back from Staten Island on Oct. 2 — 134 days from Tuesday — and to have its official reopening on Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
For most of the past year, the 900-foot-long carrier has been the only warship moored at the Homeport on the north shore of Staten Island. But this week, it will have company when some active military ships sail in for Fleet Week, an event that revolved around the Intrepid until last year.
To bring the ship back in style, Mr. White has pressed the trustees of the foundation that runs the museum and other supporters to pitch in $10 million. He also has lobbied elected officials, including the city’s five borough presidents and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, to add as much as $10 million to the $25 million they already had promised to the Intrepid project.
But he has failed to persuade Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to let the museum sell naming rights to the pier, now known simply as Pier 86, to a corporation, said John Gallagher, a spokesman for the mayor. The mayor is considering allowing the sale of sponsorship of the Intrepid’s visitor center, which sits at the edge of the pier, Mr. Gallagher said.
With the city budget being squeezed, city officials have not decided how much, if any, additional money they will provide.
“We are aware that the Intrepid has been facing financial challenges and that the renovation expenses are exceeding their original budget,” said Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesman for the Council. He added that the Council expected the ship to float back on time, with or without additional public money.
Moving the Intrepid became synonymous with futility in November 2006 when, with a clutch of elected officials standing by, a team of tugboats failed to budge the carrier from its mooring. City officials required the removal so that the pier could be rebuilt. After the Navy dredged out more of the muck, tugs towed the ship away for the first time in 25 years.
To prevent a repeat of that initial embarrassment, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to dig an extra-wide slot in the river bottom before the return, Mr. White said. In all, the cost of moving the ship out and back will total about $19 million, four times the original estimate, he said.
The main improvements to the ship’s exterior were completed a year ago, when it spent a few weeks in dry dock in Bayonne, N.J., en route to the Homeport. Workers at Bayonne Dry Dock and Repair patched up parts of the hull and repainted the entire ship.
But when the time came for the dry dock operator to collect nearly $5 million for its work, the city funds were not yet available. Officials of the Hudson River Park Trust, the state authority that is the Intrepid’s landlord and manages payments to the contractors, asked the museum to come up with some other money to tide the company over.
Mr. White said he scraped together $100,000 and hand-delivered a check to Bayonne. The trust later paid off the debt and repaid the Intrepid’s $100,000, according to Noreen Doyle, a vice president of the trust. Ms. Doyle said the tight schedule set by the Intrepid’s managers necessitated such unusual measures.
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