Revitalizing the State Museum: A Q&A with PEF Union Stewards
In January, Governor Hochul announced her proposal to invest $400 million into the City of Albany during her 2025 State of the State Address. $150 million in that proposal is intended to renovate the New York State Museum and upgrade its exhibits. TIMBER spent an afternoon discussing the proposal with PEF stewards in Division 194 to understand how rank-and-file workers in the Office of Cultural Education feel about the Governor’s proposal.
Please share a little bit about who you are.
Mickey Dobbin: I’m an archaeologist at the New York State Museum. I work in a unit called the Cultural Resource Survey Program doing cultural resource management archeology for the state. Whenever other state agencies want to do capital projects, construction or anything like that, we do a survey of the archeology and the architectural history to ensure it meets federal standards for preservation. I've been there since 2009. I was a long-term seasonal in 2016, where I was technically split between seasonal employment and the Research Foundation. The second I became a full-time employee in 2019, I became a PEF steward. I also sit on the executive board of PEF, where my seat represents the State Museum staff at the Office of Cultural Education.
PEF is the Public Employees Federation, and it is one of the biggest unions for state workers in New York. Our bargaining unit is composed of more than 54 thousand professional, scientific, and technical workers across the state. PEF covers thousands of job titles, and many of those members work in the State Museum.
Aaron Noble: I am a senior historian and curator at the State Museum overseeing political, governmental and military history collections, and I have been at the museum in various capacities since 2007. I started as an entry-level research and collections technician, then spent a few years in the exhibits department as an exhibit planner, and then came back as the Senior Historian. Within PEF, I am the Assistant Council Leader for Division 194, which represents the approximately 1,200 PEF members in the New York State Department of Education, which houses the Office of Cultural Education and, by extension, the State Museum.
You are one of the last salaried historians in America.
AN: There are six of us, but yes.
How would you explain the Office of Cultural Education simply to somebody who doesn’t know much about it?
AN: The Office of Cultural Education consists of the New York State Museum, the New York State Library, the New York State Archives, the Summer School for the Arts, and the small office that oversees and distributes funding for public broadcasting across the state. It generally covers organizations that preserve, promote, and interpret the cultural and scientific history of the state. Very simply: The museum is for three-dimensional objects. The library houses most paper and books. The archives are for papers specifically created by the state government. If it is made of paper and it was not created by the state government, it goes to the library.
If you could organize the museum, library, archives, and summer school into whatever agencies you wanted today, would it look the same?
AN: It would. These institutions belong together and, at an operational level, it works pretty cohesively. At times, leadership decisions have caused a lot of siloing and segregation of duties that were unnecessary and have led to – and continue to lead to – duplicative efforts.
MD: The Office of Cultural Education is considered a “program area” of the New York State Education Department. Most people know that NYSED does K-12 education policy or that they have an Office of Higher Education. NYSED also oversees most licenses offered by the state and runs Access VR, which does vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities who would like to enter or re-enter the workforce.
This is all to say that the composition of the Office of Cultural Education makes sense as a cohesive unit, but OCE does sometimes get overshadowed and treated like the NYSED stepchild. I give credit to the State Ed leaders who shared their desire for additional operating funding for us during this year’s budget hearings, but not a single legislator asked them about Cultural Education or Access VR.
How is OCE funded?
MD: Especially for the State Museum, OCE’s main source of funding is the Cultural Education Fee. Anyone who has ever bought a property in New York State knows that, when you do a deed transfer, there’s a whole host of fees. One of those is the Cultural Ed Fee, which was set at $15 in 2002 and hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since. It’s also a flat rate. Whether you buy the Empire State Building or a hunting cabin in upstate New York, it’s $15. In addition to that, the State Library and Archives get federal support.
The Archives also pull in revenue from service agreements with state agencies and local governments. From my understanding, this is a very good deal relative to private archival services. There are a lot of revenue lines like that which contribute to OCE’s budget, but the Cultural Education Fee is central to our finances, followed by federal funding.
That sounds okay when the economy’s in good shape and people are buying and selling a lot of properties. What happens when there’s a recession? What does that do to staffing and programming?
AN: For the first few years of its existence, the Cultural Ed fee was doing really well. There was a surplus in 2007-2008. When the recession hit, Governor Patterson swept the surplus into the state’s general fund and basically zeroed out our account without any offsets. Like all agencies, we had restrictions on hiring and there was a retirement incentive that drastically reduced our staff, and we are still well below the 2008 staffing levels. The real estate market has continued to struggle post-pandemic and was at its historic low in terms of its revenue. They're projecting that it will be another historic low this coming year.
If you account for the multiple collective bargaining agreements that have been enacted between PEF and CSEA since 2002 where those raises and contracted benefits come out of that fee, and then just the general inflationary costs of materials and products and services that we're paying for with those operating expenses, everything is more expensive than it was in 2002. So we're basically dealing with 2025 prices for everything, but with a budget that was set in 2002.
Especially at a time when construction costs are soaring and unpredictable, wouldn’t this be a good time for the state to focus its resources on the staffing crisis?
AN: It can’t be just one or the other. The governor's proposed investment into new exhibits and visitor experiences are very badly needed, but we do not have the personnel to actually make those changes and keep them sustainable. This is most acute for our frontline staff, who are stretched so thin that we sometimes cannot simultaneously staff the front desk while also checking in school groups. We're in a situation now where if a single person calls in sick, it creates an operational nightmare that ripples throughout the departments.
MD: It’s also very important for the staff working behind the scenes, like exhibit designers and fabricators. A lot of our exhibits are designed and built by OCE employees. Then you also have the Research and Collections Unit, which includes folks like the biologists, botanists, paleontologists, and geologists working in the Scientific Services of the State Museum. All of these people need to work together – and with the historians in the Archive – to build up those exhibits. So when one of those positions is vacant, it makes the job harder for everybody.
We can’t let leaders think that they can save one element of OCE by neglecting others. This happens at a lot of museums around the country: they want to pump money into exhibits, so they cut science services. Those exhibits are going to have some quality control issues if they aren’t supported by scientists, and they’re going to take a lot longer to put together. That’s to say nothing about very core positions which have been vacant for years and years, like the State Geologist position. All of these roles are bolstered by one another.
We’ve spent some time talking about what PEF members want. What does SED want in terms of OCE staffing?
AN: Historically, OCE has not been overly progressive in terms of making sure that we are appropriately staffed and able to carry out our mission. The original funding for the gallery renewal was appropriated in 2004 and, through various challenges – but mostly lack of staffing – the museum still hasn’t successfully spent an appropriation from 20 years ago. Throwing more capital funding money on top of that doesn’t necessarily get to the heart of the problem, and the lack of oversight and accountability at SED has allowed OCE to reach a point where we need 100 new staff to just return to our historic operating levels. That number is a testament to the attrition that previous directors and administrations have permitted through neglect.
It sounds like you’re targeted for sweeps when you have a surplus, but you’re asked to tighten the belt when you have unmet needs.
AN: Yes. As with all other government leadership that doesn’t understand what the staff does or needs, the mantra’s been “do more with less.”
When you say you’re 100 employees down, can you contextualize that? How many employees do you have on payroll now?
AN: Across OCE, the number is roughly 220 employees. So about a third of our positions are vacant, which means that we are at two-thirds capacity. The 100 vacancy figure is SED’s estimate. It accounts for right-sizing: some positions have been eliminated due to technology. The new leadership at OCE is taking a hard look at our actual needs, and they’ve been much better and more attentive partners to work with. It’s once you get things across the street to SED that the details get lost.
Were you privy to the Governor’s proposal to invest $150 million into the State Museum before it was announced?
MD: I was just told to watch the briefing because it would be of interest to me. There was an echo of this last year, when we got $15 million and it was announced as a big victory for us. Digging into it, I realized that it was $10 million for building a kids museum and didn’t address the staffing issues. So this year, my immediate reaction was to look into it, but I didn’t even have to: Governor Hochul immediately said it was to improve the gallery with capital projects.
I don't want to seem ungrateful: I appreciate the attention and the care. The galleries do need to be updated, and $150 million is ambitious. That’s why it was disappointing to see that our $12 million ask for operational funding was excluded from the Governor’s budget. We need a fraction of the $150 million capital investment to keep the lights on inside, and I want people in state government to understand that. We can’t keep throwing capital money at problems without understanding that it’s the state’s unionized workers who actually make our institutions run and serve the people of our state.
AN: Among the workers, there was some resentment about Hochul’s announcement that there will be an external body of tourism and cultural institutions experts convened to teach the State Museum employees how to run a museum. It was PEF employees who advocated for the institution when management was asleep at the wheel, and nobody from the Governor’s office reached out to ask staff if this was a good idea. There is absolutely a need for oversight and accountability at OCE, but not at the operations level.
The employees here are incredibly talented and dedicated. Every one of us came into the field specifically because we wanted to work in a museum, a library, or an archive. We aren’t government generalists who incidentally arrived at OCE – most of us are experts in our field. It is deeply troubling to a lot of us here that SED leadership doesn’t seem to grasp that.
MD: If there’s a table where we’re discussing the future of the State Museum, PEF deserves a seat at it. That’s the bottom line, and that’s one of the things we’re pushing for over here. It’s the workers who have a practical understanding of what the museum needs and what some of the staffing challenges are. You look at the lack of career ladders and career opportunities, and an external expert is not going to understand how that impacts members or their willingness to stay.
PEF members have been saying for years and years that we aren’t doing enough educational outreach or making the museum diverse enough to reflect the state. We care about these things and we’ve been saying them, because what we really care about is running a better and more functional museum. It’s been falling on deaf ears.
For the PEF members who’ve been pushing for investment into OCE all of these years, are the Governor’s various proposals equal parts validating and totally invalidating?
AN: It has been the least satisfying “I told you so” moment in my memory.
And other members feel the same way?
AN: Yes. When Mickey first became a steward, he was the one that really started urging the employees to fill the leadership vacuum by imagining a new direction for the museum and advocating for it. He’s really been remarkable at engaging our members and helping them find their voices. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and pushing for better, and we want the state to acknowledge that.
MD: Thank you, Aaron. I do want to add that we have had allies, especially among the Capital Region delegates to the state legislature. We are particularly grateful for Senator Fahy, and Assemblymembers McDonald, Woerner, and Romero, who understand that a museum without staff is essentially a memorial. If you talk to community members from the Capital Region who came to the museum as kids, their memories are all about the thoughtful, personalized, and engaging educational programming delivered by staff. You don’t hear a lot of cherished memories about a really striking diorama or mannequin.
So you want a seat at the table for planning the museum’s future. What would you need to see in this year’s state budget to trust that legislators and executives are beginning to grasp the impact of OCE’s vacancies?
MD: We want to see $12 million more in the state budget to support OCE operations. We are reaching a breaking point in staffing, and we’d like the Governor’s office to reach out to us to hear about that. If you have any questions or want to know more about anything, there is literally nothing we like to talk about more than the State Museum, Library, and Archives.
AN: In addition to the operational funding, we also want to see some efforts to stabilize and rationalize OCE’s revenue. Governor Hochul was pretty adamant about her unwillingness to raise the Cultural Education Fund fee. Giving us a one-time $12 million infusion is important, but it also means that SED would need to come back next year and plead for it again. It’s an arbitrary and unstable way to fund our work that could be fixed by just folding us into a general fund.
Right – even if the Cultural Education Fund were totally adequate for funding OCE, it is easy to understand how much anxiety staff might feel about being supported by revenue they have very little control over. Besides political inertia, is there an argument for not folding you into a general fund?
MD: It weighs heavily on our members’ minds. After the economic crash, members received (basically) pink slips. Even though the union was able to negotiate with the state to save everyone’s jobs, everyone around here has a pretty good sense of statewide real estate transactions since then, and that obviously isn’t germane to most of our work. Because we’re civil servants, and because we belong to PEF, there are a lot of avenues for us to fight to protect our members, but all of the energy the union has to devote to pointless damage control is energy that isn’t spent on imagining how to deliver better services to the community.
The argument in favor of the Cultural Education Fund was that, by having a devoted source of revenue, we’d be protected from sweeps. Obviously, that argument is not very compelling when a Governor turns around and successfully targets the Cultural Education Fund with sweeps.
AN: That is exactly right. The justification was that we’d be exempt from sweeps, and then after 2007-2008 the rationale changed to “we have a lot of significant legislative asks this year and folding you into a general fund isn’t a priority.” The fact that we’ve been in this structural deficit is a permanent source of anxiety for our members, especially since the pandemic. A lot of people are waiting for the other shoe to drop with the state finally saying: “enough - we’re not going to just write off this huge deficit every year.” People sit around wondering when the state is going to come in with layoffs to remedy the budget rather than taking effective action to fix the underlying issue.
And that underlying issue is basically an exercise in a spreadsheet with arbitrary figures that nobody seems willing to amend.
MD: Exactly – it’s a complete fabrication. Very recently, we were told that our lowest-grade techs can’t lead public programming about their research because of the deficit. If you’re looking at the imaginary spreadsheet math, that might even make sense, because the budget is tight and we have a few grade 18s. But the imaginary spreadsheet math making our budget so tight is also responsible for making those employees grade 14s: we’re talking about people with Masters degrees. They’re grade 14s because OCE can’t give them any realistic opportunities to get promoted and now can’t give them opportunities to promote their work, either.
Do you see this upcoming investment into the State Museum as an opportunity to illuminate the state’s understanding about PEF members’ concerns?
AN: I am fearful that the opposite may happen. The state is so invested in short-term capital projects that I worry that we may see the agency double down on addressing manpower needs with more short-term employees, special payroll employees, and low-grade technicians working on a limited-term basis. Even worse, we might see the work of exhibit specialists and designers contracted out because there’s all this enthusiasm and capital funding and an operational shortfall in the union positions that would make any of this possible under an ambitious timeline.
MD: Privatization of any kind is a huge concern for us with this latest push. As Aaron noted, we want PEF members to be designing and building our galleries and exhibits, and administrators and visitors who care about their quality and longevity should feel exactly the same way. If you have a contractor come in and do a bunch of work fast and then they leave, they’re not going to be able to maintain those exhibits or update them, and you lose all that institutional knowledge the second their contract ends.
The attention also makes us concerned about privatization, or quasi-privatization, of the state museum as a whole. You see it all over the country when a public institution has a contrived but structural operating deficit. Turning the museum into another nonprofit or public benefit corporation is a red line for PEF.
Do you worry about the state increasing its reliance on volunteer labor to erode work that should really be the responsibility of bargaining unit employees?
AN: Ironically, PEF members are the strongest advocates for a robust volunteer corps. The reason we don’t have volunteers covering more of our work now is that a previous director bullied and forced out so many of the Visitor Services staff and then never refilled the position, and now we don’t have any employees who can spare the time to coordinate scheduling or arrange parking.
This was exactly the sort of obtuse leadership that you get when administrators refuse to listen to the staff who have their boots on the ground. Our rank-and-filers were desperately trying to communicate that many of our volunteers are retirees who like to sit together and socialize with one another, and the previous director decided to split them all up to cover more gallery entrances over the objections of volunteers and staff, as though they were beholden to do something they didn’t enjoy on a voluntary basis. Decisions like that really damaged our relationships with volunteers and, by extension, our services and visitor experiences.
MD: From the union’s perspective, there is a lot of space for volunteers at the museum before we even have to worry about eroding our bargaining unit, in large part because the work that our staff does requires formal expertise and training. As much as we talk about privatization through nonprofits, we even believe there is a role for a 501c3 or similar to support museum operations without damaging our units, especially when it comes to stewarding donations and grants. We’d need a firewall to make sure trustees don’t feel empowered to bark orders at our staff, but – at a conceptual level – we’re willing to work with the state to navigate a lot of those thorny issues together in support of the museum’s services. We can’t do that without a seat at the table.
This has been a very educational discussion. Thank you, gentlemen.
We thank Mickey Dobbin and Aaron Noble for taking the time to chat with us, and for all of their hard work promoting cultural education in the state.
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