Coyote Point Museum board ousted

The move is one of the final shots in a fast and furious battle to save the 52-year-old educational facility and sets into motion a proposal to increase fundraising and improve both programs and exhibits.

"We have a great opportunity ahead of us for the museum and a lot of hard work, but we’ve got so many people now who want to be involved and that is really exciting. The prospect of lots of changes and evolution in the programming, exhibits and building really excite us all,” Linda Lanier, co-chair of the Campaign to Save Coyote Point, wrote in an e-mail.

Lanier will chair the new board, which will be comprised of a handful of former board members from the 1980s and 1990s. Former eight-term U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey and retired Sun Microsystems executive Eric Richert are on the board. Almost all board members have served, or are serving, on other nonprofit boards.

The proposal also forms an advisory council, headed by Campaign to Save Coyote Point Museum co-chair Linda Liebes, which will be comprised of national experts.

The board will immediately hire a permanent executive director and director of development, according to the proposal.

The new board aims to increase fundraising to strengthen the museum’s endowment and long-term financial stability. It promises to maintain a balanced annual budget, establish new governance procedures and implement a process for major changes to the environmental hall.

It will create a new program and exhibit committee to implement upgrades to aging exhibits.

The board also includes Edith Eddy, executive director of the Compton Foundation, a private foundation in Redwood City with assets of approximately $80 million. Other members include Thomas Ehrlich, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Nancy Glaser, a consultant for national and international companies who focuses on high growth and repositioning projects; Cheryl Hightower, associate superintendent of the San Mateo County Office of Education; Rafe Pomerance, founder and chair of the Climate Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and Peter Steinhart, former editor of Audubon Magazine and past member of the museum’s President’s Council.

The Campaign to Save Coyote Point Museum raised $543,249 from 776 donors since Aug. 31. The fundraising campaign was sparked by news that another nonprofit, the 11th Hour Project, was considering a takeover of the troubled museum. The 11th Hour Project, run by a group of Silicon Valley executives, wanted to turn the museum into a large-scale global warming education center.

The group withdrew its informal proposal Aug. 22.

Dana Yates can be reached by e-mail: dana@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 106. What do you think of this story? Send a letter to the editor: letters@smdailyjournal.com.<