An outdoor exhibit at the Lewis Army Museum at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington on June 18, 2024. Washington Sen. Patty Murray wants answers for why the Lewis Army Museum is slated to close within the next couple of years due to the Army’s downsizing effort. (Pamela Sleezer/Joint Base Lewis-McChord Public Affairs Office)
(Tribute News Service) — Many questions linger as to why the Lewis Army Museum at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., has been pegged for closure — and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray is demanding answers.
On Monday, the Washington Democrat sent U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll a letter asking why the West Coast’s sole Army museum is set to shutter.
It comes weeks after the Army announced that it is consolidating or closing many of its 41 active-duty museums. Criteria cited include poor visitor attendance and building maintenance backlogs, but Lewis Army Museum supporters say that that isn’t the case here in Washington.
The Army’s downsizing effort is estimated to save $114 million over a decade, bolstering its push to direct resources toward “readiness and lethality.”
The move hasn’t exactly been popular.
“JBLM is full of rich history that deserves to be celebrated, not brushed to the side,” Murray wrote in the July 21 letter.
Murray isn’t the only lawmaker from Washington to decry the decision.
U.S. Rep. Marilyn Strickland condemned the looming closure of the Lewis Army Museum in her own June 30 letter to Driscoll. State Rep. Mari Leavitt, a University Place Democrat whose district encompasses the museum, also has voiced her concerns with the choice and, in her view, overall lack of transparency.
Murray is pressing Driscoll to provide the museum’s annual operating cost, reasons it was picked for closure and plans for its artifacts, among other probes.
The U.S. Army’s media relations division did not immediately return McClatchy’s request for comment.
A spokesperson with the U.S. Army Center of Military History previously told McClatchy that the Army is still going over its closure-and-consolidation plan. He said the final approval would probably come down later in July, but that the Lewis Army Museum is slated to close within the next couple of years.
“The facilities that we will be able to maintain are going to be 21st-century world-class museum facilities that are going to tell the Army story,” the spokesperson said at the time. For those that are closing, “we are going to do our best to include parts of those stories in these sustaining museums.”
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