UPDATE 04/24/25 3:00 p.m: National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium President and CEO Kurt Strand provided an update via email on the status of its $31,200 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
"Following the news regarding the status of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we received notice of termination on April 9. Prior to the termination letter, we had submitted a payment reimbursement request to IMLS, which is a standard grants management process. When the termination notice arrived, it lacked details. This left us, and our peers across the country, in a state of uncertainty about what may come next. We were uncertain if our reimbursement request would be honored by IMLS.
This week, our request for reimbursement was honored by IMLS and we received reimbursement for expenditures incurred from 09/15/2024 - 03/31/2025. Staying true to our core value of transparency, we’ve kept our staff updated, including a message yesterday afternoon letting them know that our reimbursement of $31,200 was honored by IMLS and paid out this week.
[T]he grant contract has been terminated by the federal government. The reimbursement does not change the grant status or the fluidity of the situation. It was, however, welcomed news for us. We are fortunate to have received payment for completed work, but we are uncertain what this means for pending requests or the future of federal grant funding opportunities. We have pending requests to IMLS and Iowa Homeland Security (FEMA subaward) that we submitted in 2024. We do not have status updates on any pending federal funding requests."
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The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque is undergoing various habitat and visitor experience improvements while navigating federal funding uncertainty, following a letter from the Trump administration that denied remaining grant funding.
President and CEO of the museum and aquarium, Kurt Strand, said they received the letter in early April, terminating the remaining $31,000 from an approved grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The letter simply stated: “We were no longer in alignment with the administration's priorities,” Strand said in a phone interview with WVIK.
Strand said the total $150,000 grant from IMLS was to draft and implement an interpretive master plan that would guide the museum and aquarium for the next twenty years.
“So having an interpretive master plan is that guidelines for all of our staff from front office staff to an educator, to somebody creating a school program, to the people who create our signs, to marketing and development,” Strand said. “And it does provide this consistency in messaging. So if you think about a museum and aquarium like we are, we want to ensure that the stories we're telling all connect together so that they understand the role of animals and our collections and why together we have living and historic collections.”
Strand said they’ve received over $2 million in grants from the IMLS for the last twenty years. The museum and aquarium were in the process of submitting another grant application to the IMLS for additional support regarding the master plan implementation before the denial letter.
“We're at the stage now, we're doing implementation and then we have planned or had planned to build out an evaluation program so we could continue to evaluate how we're doing and then improve the experience from school programs to signage to exhibits, et cetera,” Strand said. “The grant, if it doesn't come through, we'll still do it, but it's probably going to take us substantially longer because we'll have to fund it by ourselves or if somebody decides or a foundation decides to support that could help. But it's critically important for us to do this. It just might take us another couple years.”
Strand says the interpretive master plan will continue despite the funding loss. The museum is moving meetings with scholarly advisors helping with the master plan to remote meetings to save costs. According to Strand, the museum and aquarium will look at other areas to redirect funding and complete the interpretive master plan.
The museum and aquarium recently received word from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' independent accreditation commission that they were included in its mid-year meeting, which approved accreditation. The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium was one of thirty to receive the honor.
A big reason for the accreditation renewal was the museum and aquarium’s interpretive master plan.
Vice President of Living Collections Andy Allison explained.
“Where we're just trying to make sure that we encourage conservation and stewardship with everything that we do,” Allison said. “So, they were impressed by our master plan. They were impressed with our conservation activities. We spend a lot of effort trying to make sure that we're not just, we're not just a place to come and see animals, but we're actually directly helping to save species in the wild.”
These conservation efforts include propagating a toad species from Wyoming that is essentially extinct in the wild. Allison said they sent over 50,000 tadpoles back to Wyoming. They also care for freshwater mussels found in the Mississippi as well as the massasauga rattlesnake.
“Things like the Florida Reef Track Rescue Project, where we house corals here that were collected from the Florida Reef Track ahead of a new disease that had been discovered a few years ago,” Allison said. “And so these were taken off the reef before the disease got to them. This disease was killing sometimes 90% of the corals that it contacted.”
In addition to conservation, the aquarium is improving the habitat for river otters. Allison said the aquarium took notice of scientific studies detailing that river otters thrive better in a larger land-to-water ratio environment.
“The idea being that otters should be considered land animals that swim. They're not water animals that crawl,” Allison said. “So with that in mind, we created a large outdoor habitat for our river otters, so that the animals will be able to go inside or outside.”
The habitat includes additional substrate and logs for the otters to dig around and explore, as well as a slide for them to use. According to Allison, the otters will not be the only ones benefiting from the new habitat.
“We've got a pop-up log where kids or agile adults can crawl underneath the habitat and pop up inside this log, and they'll feel like they're right there in the exhibit with the animals,” Allison said.
The improvements are part of the museum and aquarium's $12.5 million Preserve the Wonder capital campaign. The funding is improving exhibits like the River of Innovation, which features a donated belt-driven machine shop, and other exhibits, such as the Rivers to the Sea gallery.
“[A]lso, some of the infrastructure that is behind the scenes that people don't notice. Things like furnaces or HVAC systems and plumbing systems that your average guest may not notice, but they sure notice when they're not working, right?” Allison said.
Allison mentioned the improved exhibits will open by early summer, with some opening throughout the spring. Allison said the museum is also hosting a temporary exhibit called Ice Dinosaurs this summer, where animatronic dinosaurs detail the lives of dinosaurs found north of the Arctic Circle.
“And many of them are thought to have had feathers and possibly warm blood, and all of these things that you really don't associate with dinosaurs. So, it's a really cool opportunity to learn more about what life was like 200,000 years ago,” Allison said.
Strand has been talking with other institutions on how to navigate these tumultuous times for museums and libraries collectively. Strand points out that public engagement is the most significant aid in their efforts.
“[T]he more people reach out to their local representatives, senators, representatives in other areas, and just spread the word of the impact,” Strand said. “So, for example, we generate 16 million of economic impact in the Dubuque area. That's a big deal. And I'm hoping that the senators and representatives will talk to the administration about how critically important museums, zoos, aquariums, other arts and culture areas, arboretums, etc. And that funding enables all of these organizations to do things that they probably couldn't do in a business as usual situation. So the best thing that can happen is funding is released, comes back to us in ways that enable us to continue to make great experiences for those who come and look to our organizations for excitement, fun, education.”
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