The Mesa Historical Museum would close its Lehi facility by October, and its popular spring baseball exhibit would move to the downtown Mesa area and housed at what is now the Arizona Museum for Youth, under a plan presented Thursday to the City Council.

The plan is driven by financial problems that both museums face and that led to the history museum’s seeking city assistance.

Johann Zietsman, Mesa arts and cultural director, crafted and presented the plan to Council, explaining that his goal was to protect and work with the collections of both museums to create a new model for museums.

He said history museums throughout the country are on hard times and the city will “rethink” how it presents its history to the public.

For instance, Zietsman said that pieces of the history museum’s collections could show up in city buildings and possibly malls and other high traffic areas.

Zietsman said history museum director Lisa Anderson would be put on the city’s payroll, in part funded by revenues currently generated by the museum.

The plan was generally praised by Council members as important to the city’s quality of life and received a strong endorsement from Mayor Scott Smith.

Smith said if the plan was simply a bailout, he wouldn’t support it.

He added, “I wholeheartedly support this change in direction and vision.”
Smith said the city was the downtown’s largest landowner and had a vested interest in consolidating cultural offerings, such as the Cactus League exhibit, downtown.

He and Vice Mayor Kyle Jones spoke of the changes Zietsman outlined in broad terms as enhancing the quality of life in Mesa and the draw to the downtown.

“We want Cactus League visitors to experience downtown,” Smith said.

Smith did offer the Arizona Youth Museum a critical assessment of the museum’s branding and marketing.

Since running for mayor, he said he has become familiar with the institution, but suspects that the general population is neither aware of it or understands its purpose.

“The first question is what do they do?” Smith said.  “There is not a broad understanding of what they do there.”

Presumably that question now falls to Zietsman as he reshapes the downtown museum landscape.

(Full disclosure:  The writer was invited to join the Mesa Historical Museum board shortly before these developments.  New board members are not seated until June.)

U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake doesn’t find much on which to agree with President Barack Obama, but the East Valley Republican on Thursday applauded Obama’s loosening of travel restrictions to Cuba.

For years, Flake was a lonely voice in Congress for opening travel between the United States and Cuba.  Flake made no headway under former President Bush, whose administration made it even more difficult for Cuban Americans to visit family members still in Cuba or send them gifts and staples.

But Flake told an East Valley crowd of business and political leaders Thursday morning that he was “impressed” with how Obama handled the politically active Cuban-American community in Florida during the presidential campaign and with the first step the Democrat President took to ease travel between the US and Cuba.

Flake said he hopes the next step is to lift the travel ban completely.  Americans should be able to travel without government restrictions, the former director of the Goldwater Institute, said.