Museum of Glass Expansion Boosted by Tacoma City Council Loan

The Museum of Glass’s $22 million capital expansion project received a boost on Tuesday night as the Tacoma City Council unanimously approved a $1.25 million loan from the Community and Economic Development Special Revenue Fund. It’s a chance for the city to help preserve and expand one of the city’s civic monuments while also ensuring that it can continue to draw in glass artist and tourist to the waterfront.

As a a result of this project, a new 4,000 square foot gallery – the Lino Tagliapietra Legacy Gallery – will house 175 works that are gifted to the museum once construction is complete. The new gallery will be built in place of the existing theater in order to expand the space available to traveling exhibitions that the Museum can host. Alongside the new gallery, the existing galleries will be upgraded with modern lighting, better flow for visitors, improved environmental controls, better cases, and new onsite storage to enable growth of the Museum’s permanent exhibit items.

This loan will be repaid over a 24 month term and will have a flat 9% fee due at the time of maturity.

City staff recommended the loan because of the economic impact the Museum has, over 100,000 visitors annually, and the educational opportunities it affords glass artist in the region.

Tacoma’s Community and Economic Development Special Revenue Fund comes from funds that were granted to the city by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the Urban Development Grant Program back in the 1970’s. The city government elected to use those one time funds as a revolving loan program so that it would be able to benefit from the HUD grant decades into the future; which is why the money is there for the Museum of Glass’s capital project in 2026.

Spokane fires

At the end of the meeting, Tacoma mayor Anders Ibsen spoke briefly about the fires that have gutted Spokane, Wash. He advised that the City of Spokane’s H.O.M.E Starts Here Fund – which was created to help residents gather resources when they’re about to become homeless – will be used to help victims of the fires who lost everything. The city isn’t taking any administrative fees out of donations.

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