The Reno County Commission slashed the Reno County Museum’s annual funding allocation by $45,000 for 2025, a 23.4% decrease.
During the budget discussion, at least one commissioner erroneously stated that the museum’s funding had increased in 2024, which is prima facie false.
The museum operates with two full-time and one part-time employee. It desperately needs an archivist to properly categorize and catalog items already in its possession. Without an archivist, the museum is quickly running low on its capacity to receive new donations.
History is not just the past—it is the present. Preserving history as it is being made is vital.
History has meaning and is instructive. When Hutchinson looks back to decisions that have repercussions today, understanding the context of the discussions and reasons for a final decision helps us avoid repeating mistakes.
History teaches us respect, the difficulties faced by our pioneering founding fathers, the economic boom and bust cycles, and the ebb and flow of newcomers who often have different backgrounds and expectations.
A different commissioner pulled out a mobile phone and said (I’m paraphrasing) that people could just look things up on the Internet, revealing a stunning ignorance of historic preservation and the enormous undertaking of digitizing collected documents.
The county is spending millions to digitize its historical governmental documents, a monumental undertaking. Artifacts and documents related to hundreds of thousands of Reno County residents’ daily lives don’t just magically appear on a Google search. They must be carefully scanned, cataloged, indexed and stored on accessible computer networks.
Not all digitized documents are discoverable via simple search, and many more are not freely available. The internet is not omniscient. With new AI tools, those gaps tend to get filled with “hallucinations,” unreliable and often erroneous statements derived from factual and non-factual information. Without proper preservation, fact-checking disappears.
Unpreserved history leaves a void for those who wish to ignore it and rewrite it. Carefully preserved tangible items are the ultimate source material, and truth is the ultimate judge.
The Reno County commissioners dropped the ball by decreasing the Reno County Museum’s funding. Our history is rich and deep. Immigrants and native-born residents have done and are doing great things worth remembering and celebrating.
Please support the Reno County Museum’s fundraiser “Bootleggers, Bandits & Booze” event on Saturday, November 16. Tickets are available on the museum website’s event page.
Gina Long is a co-founder and the Managing Editor of the Hutchinson Tribune. She can be contacted at glong@hutchtribune.com.
Bronwyn Page / September 15, 2024
Before the county commission decided to cut the $45,000 in funding to the Reno County Museum, the cost per Reno County resident to support the museum, something that was voted and passed by the public, was $3 per person for 1 year!! Thank goodness that OUR county commission board saved tax payers those extra few cents a year!!
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Susan Alexander / September 15, 2024
Excellent point, Brownyn. I’m shocked our county commission cut the funding for the museum when it is already short of help.
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Keith Richardson / September 15, 2024
You know, most old fogeys—like our county commissioners—love to sit around and talk about the ‘good old days.’ Of course those bygone days were largely ‘good’ only because these same old fogeys were young, ignorant rascals at the time. So you might think that our commissioners would really appreciate and support an institution like the Reno County Museum where the past (including their past) is recorded, preserved, displayed and respected. Instead they seem to think you can get all the history you might need off your phone—just Google it! Easy-peasy. Why waste money on a museum? And that means our own county fogeys haven’t got much smarter with age. Where do they think all those old-timey pictures on their phones come from? Where do they think the research that creates the historical articles and papers they read on their phones is studied and explored? It doesn’t happen in some mystical, ethereal Googleverse or ‘The Cloud.’ It happens in brick and mortar, real-world museums worldwide, including our own Reno County Museum.
It certainly appears that the RCM’s budget was hacked and gashed because the commissioners thought it was an easy target. I mean, who visits a museum besides childless cat ladies, right?
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Susan Alexander / September 15, 2024
Great post, Keith Richardson. You made an excellent point about where our history information on the web originates. I wonder if all of our county commissioners have even visited the museum. I still remember the excellent exhibit it put together on polio.
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