Museum director calls Kennewick city hall discussion ‘wrong and misleading’
The administrator of Museum at Keewaydin says its volume of visitors is much higher than what was discussed at a city council workshop.
At least 900 paid a trip in 2025 to the museum at 205 W. Keewaydin Drive in downtown Kennewick, said administrator Misty Ayers. And so far this year — despite the museum being closed for six weeks for floor replacements — another 600 have visited.
That’s much larger than the 771 unique visits that Councilman Loren Anderson noted at the June 23 meeting. That statistic is based off of two years’ worth of mobile device location data, which Ayers called “flawed” because it does not account for children, senior citizens without phones or users who disable location sharing.
“This figure in no way reflects our actual visitor count,” Ayers said, calling the city’s figures “incorrect and misleading.”
Ayers, the East Benton County Historical Society’s board of directors and museum supporters are fighting to save their 9,000-square-foot building as the council mulls city hall replacement concepts that risk big program and spacial changes for the museum.
A petition started a month ago to “stop the demolition of the Museum at Keewaydin” has received nearly 1,000 signatures. But city administrators have cautioned that they don’t plan to close or take away the museum, and that designers will weigh programming in the new city hall.
No hard decisions have been made about the future of city hall, the Museum at Keewaydin or any of the buildings on the city’s downtown civic campus. The city owns the museum building and leases it out to the East Benton County Historical Society through a contract set to expire in 2031. Still, museum leaders say they want a voice in the future of their long-term home.
Museum at Keewaydin is a repository for some of the earliest historical paraphernalia and research materials in the greater Kennewick area, dating back to the 19th century.
It has Oregon Trail-era spinning wheels, Columbia River petroglyphs, railroad artifacts, Hanford site materials, Native American arrowheads and spear points, and an extensive library of newspaper clippings and documents that go back to the early 1900s.
At its recent meeting, the city council came to a consensus by choosing to rule out a remodel of the current city hall at 210 W. 6th Ave. or building new at the corner of Auburn Street and 6th Avenue.
It instead gave preference to two concepts that would demolish and rebuild city hall on its current footprint — though one of those options would also require the museum to be demolished and moved into the new building with at least 3,500 square feet.
Ayers in a recent blog post said the updated options still “hurt the museum.”
Moving the museum into city hall would be a “significant reduction” of exhibition space and leaves “no space for artifact storage or offices.” Its building, constructed in 1982, currently allows for 5,000 square feet of public exhibition space.
“Designers of this plan used the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center as an example of what a museum inside of city hall could look like,” Ayers said.
“What they failed to mention is that the City of Moses Lake is cutting ties with their museum by 2029, a devastating blow to the history and community of Moses Lake. This plan has the city spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to reduce our space and force us into city hall, where we will be treated as an afterthought.”
Moses Lake plans to offload museum operations to a nonprofit, specifically.
While the other city hall option would retain the museum building, it would also eliminate access to the museum’s basement garage door, hindering the historical society’s ability to transport large artifacts, Ayers said.
It would also relocate parking farther from the museum itself, limiting access for disabled and elderly visitors and volunteers.
