Museum Admission Fee

Financial goals have not been reached at the new $103 million Gettysburg Battlefield Visitor Center, so the non-profit group that’s operating the complex is introducing a new fee structure. Beginning in October, a fee may be imposed upon visitors entering the park’s artifact museum.

“We’ve tried just about everything,” park Supt. Dr. John A. Latschar said Thursday morning during a media conference at the visitor center. “We’re just not meeting the goals and hitting our numbers. Nothing was working, so we came to a conclusion that the best thing we could do is change the fee structure.”

The Gettysburg Foundation, which partnered with the park to build the facility and intends to operate the complex for 20 years, is proposing a $7.50 single admission fee to tour the museum galleries, watch a 22-minute feature film and view the Cyclorama painting.

“I think this will be a plus for the majority of our visitors, and overall, a better experience,” said Gettysburg Foundation President Robert C. Wilburn. “We’re giving people more options, and we’ve put together a good package that’s affordable.”

Under the current fee structure, the park and Foundation expected to lose $1.78 million annually from film and Cyclorama ticket sales. The facility opened in mid-April.

“We’ve been open now for about five months,” said Wilburn. “It was a good shakedown period...to see how visitors were reacting to what we were offering.

Now, we know the trends and we can adjust our packages.”

Previously, there had been no charge to enter the museum, both at the new Baltimore Pike visitor center and the old Taneytown Road facility. Plans for the new visitor center date back nearly 14 years, and the concept of the museum had always been for a “free” experience.

The park owns more than one million Civil War artifacts, and about 1500 of those relics are on display in the museum gallery.

“We’ve said from the beginning that the museum will be free,” said Latschar. “Before we do any of this or make a final decision, we’ll listen carefully to the public, as we’ve done every other time in the past. We wouldn’t be doing this unless we felt it was the best method of meeting our mission.”

Under the proposal, there would still be no charge to enter the visitor center.

“Most of the opportunities here are still free,” said Latschar. “There is no entrance fee to the battlefield — that’s not the case at other parks. The greatest portion of our new building is still free. Obviously, we’re not going to charge people to come into the visitor center for orientation, information and to use the restrooms.”

Adult tickets to watch the park’s 22-minute film, dubbed “A New Birth of Freedom,” had been priced at $8 for adults.

During the first four months of operation of the new facility, the percentage of visitors choosing to view the film, statistics show, ranged from 18-24 percent.

The foundation’s revenue projection formulas were based on 33 percent of the visitors purchasing film tickets.

About one million people have passed through the visitor center’s doors since it opened in April.

“The bottom line is, the visitors that are coming into our facility weren’t expecting to pay that high of a fee,” said Latschar. “We’ve seen and heard enough to know that we had to take another route.”

The park and foundation originally intended to couple the movie and Cyclorama painting in a ticket package (for $12) once the restored artwork opens to the public in late-September.

But those plans have been scrapped, because the prices were not a big hit with visitors.

“One of the main concerns we heard was that people were paying eight dollars to see a 22 minute film, when they could go to the mall and pay $8 to see a two-hour movie,” Latschar said regarding the park’s film about the Battle of Gettysburg and its significance to American history. “In my opinion, the film is the best production ever made on the Civil War, but people just weren’t watching it.”

The 2008 operating budget for the visitor center, according to park statistics, relied on $4.8 million from film and Cyclorama revenues.

But current sales trends indicate that ticket revenues would have barely topped $3 million at the end of 2008.

For a short time, the Foundation required all museum guests to stand in line at the ticket booth and listen to sales pitches for the movie, even though the museum tickets were complimentary.

“We felt like we were harassing people,” laughed Latschar. “We made people get in line for a free ticket. We did it for two weeks and it didn’t work.”

Wilburn added: “No one liked it...getting in line for a free ticket. Our employees didn’t like it either.”

Long-term arrangements between the Park Service and Foundation require the agency, which employs more than 100 staffers, to operate the visitor center on behalf of the park for two decades, at no cost to the federal government.

The foundation’s annual operating budget for the complex depends upon three primary sources of revenue: sales from a gift store, operated by Event Network; sales from the building’s cafeteria, operated by Aramark; and ticket revenues from the film and Cyclorama programs.

Specifically, the foundation must use those revenues in one of four ways: to pay down the project’s $15 million debt; to cover the facility’s operational and maintenance costs; to build up a capital reserve; and to provide annual contributions to both the Park Service and Gettysburg National Military Park.

“Now that we’ve got the first half-year of operations under our belt, we’ve had some operational pain that we need to resolve, so that’s why we’ve come up with these changes,” said Latschar.

A 30-day comment period on the proposal opens today to the public.

The park is gathering those comments, holding a public workshop Sept. 18, and making a decision no earlier than Sept. 29.

The proposal is subject to approval from the National Park Service.

BY SCOT ANDREW PITZER Times Staff Writer

BY SCOT ANDREW PITZER
Times Staff Writer