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OCOTILLO — Large paintings, ancient pottery and wall-sized geoglyph replicas sit in the Imperial Valley College Desert Museum here off of Interstate 8.

The $700,000 building and partial collection of 12,000 archaic artifacts of the early residents of the Colorado River Basin are awaiting the next step in getting the museum up and running. The building was erected under a 1992 memorandum of understanding between the Imperial Community College District and the Desert Museum Society.

In the MOU, it was understood between the two entities that once the nonprofit Desert Museum Society finished financing the construction of the museum building on the 25-acre plot of land owned by the Imperial Valley College district, the district would take over the operation of the museum including operational costs and salaries of staff, according to the 2010 Imperial County Civil Grand Jury report.

Once the final OK was given by Imperial County for the building to be occupied in 2008, IVC did not have the funds to employ a full-time staff, Todd Evangelist, executive director of the Imperial Valley College Foundation, said.

“IVC just has not had the funds for the payroll to fund that position (of a full-time curator),” he said. “It’s complicated because there are long-term contracts that need to be drawn up when hiring through the school district.”

Because of the financial problems that have arisen at IVC due, at least in part, to the statewide budget cuts to education, IVC and the Desert Museum Society have gone through as many as six versions of revisions to the MOU “to reflect our present circumstances,” John Lau, vice president of business services at the college, said.

“We’re in the middle of finalizing our budget,” he said, stating that IVC should pass its budget sometime in September. “We’re anxious to get this done one way or another; right now it’s kind of a work in progress,” he said.

The Desert Museum Society is waiting on IVC to approve its most recent revision to the MOU, which if passed by IVC’s Board of Trustees, would deed the 25 acres to the Desert Museum Society, Chuck Bucher, treasurer of the society, said.

“I think if (IVC) could, they would have run the museum (but) we had hints of this coming in 2003 when they started having lots of budget problems,” Bucher said. “The best thing I could see is if they deed the property over to us then we’re in the driver’s seat, we can make our own decisions and we can see about getting this thing up and running,” he said.

“Right now we are surveying for a director,” Martin Fitzurka, president of the Desert Museum Society, said. “We’re collecting resumes. And if we can get the money (we’d like to be able to get the museum going),” he said.

Yet, nothing at this point is certain.

Deeding the land to DMS is “still up in the air because the president and the board still have to look at (the current draft  the MOU),” Lau said.

“Our final budget will be passed in September and that will give us direction as to what we can do with the museum,” he said.

>>Staff Writer Roman Flores can be reached at 760-337-3439 or rflores@ivpressonline.com