2 Museum Satellites Envisioned

The opening of a Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History facility in Burbank, announced earlier this week, would not preclude a similar satellite from being built in the Sepulveda Basin as part of a proposed arts center, a museum official said.

Initial designs for the envisioned Arts Park LA show the museum being housed in a modern, wing-shaped building. A private group called the Cultural Foundation has been trying for more than a decade to build the 60-acre complex along the basin’s northern edge and has been hoping to include a museum site along with workshops, galleries and theaters.

“The facility in Burbank is 12,500 square feet and we’re talking, in Arts Park, about 20,000 square feet,” said Ross Hopkins, the foundation’s acting executive director.

The Burbank satellite, a first for the museum, will be located in the Media City Center and will include artifacts from the county’s gem and textile collections and life-size replicas of dinosaurs.

“Burbank is an entirely separate issue,” said Mary Ann Dunn, a museum spokeswoman. “It does not affect Arts Park.”

But standing between Arts Park and a satellite facility are both money and government approval.

The foundation has yet to show that it has raised the money needed to build its multimillion-dollar complex. And before any such construction can begin, the Woodland Hills group must hammer out environmental reports that are acceptable to both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Los Angeles, which control the flood plain.

The approval process was slowed by recent flooding, which caused the Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate proposed construction in the basin, Hopkins said. He estimated that revised drafts of the environmental reports would be presented at public hearings in early July.

Museum officials are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“A lot depends on what happens as a result of the environmental impact report,” Dunn said. “After all the reports are done, we would have to carefully consider” the project.

Jane Boeckmann, one of the Cultural Foundation’s principal members, is also on the museum’s board of governors.