The Southland Museum and Art Gallery (SMAG) Trust board has agreed that it does not own the pyramid museum building and has instead decided to step back and let the ownership lie with the Invercargill City Council. 

Earlier in the year, it came to light that the ICC may be the rightful owners of the building after ICC chief executive Clare Hadley said the council had uncovered a letter written by the museum board to the council in 1960, which stated that the ICC is the owner. 

It came as a complete shock to the SMAG board members who believed the trust had been the owner for many years.

SMAG board trustee Mr Roger Eagles doubted whether the evidence presented by Ms Hadley had any real legal weighting, but made the point that fighting a battle for the building would be costly as well as more or less pointless, given the building was closed due to being an earthquake risk.  

"The building is probably a liability rather than an asset now and to what purpose would we pursue an inquiry?...because we're not going to be able to anything with the building, it will probably be demolished and a new one will be created," he said. 

SMAG board trustee Evelyn Cook echoed these comments saying, "what we thought was an asset that we owned, probably has not really ever been truly ours and it is [a] total a liability."

She urged the board to take the opportunity of washing its hands of the building and "get on with what we can work on," which was the board's "repurposed" curatorship and governance of the museum collections.

The ICC will soon take over ownership and management of the museum. 

The 'Repurposing SMAG board trust' report recommended that board members would need to have the appropriate skills, knowledge, and experience to effectively govern a museum and should not be made up of elected councillors, as it is currently. 

The SMAG board agreed to hold a workshop for SMAG trustees to come together and discuss all recommendations made in the report before any decisions are made.