Delbridge Museum bill to donate taxidermy bill heads to South Dakota House floor

A bill that would allow for the donation of the taxidermy at the Great Plains Zoo's Delbridge Museum to an out-of-state entity advanced to the South Dakota House floor this morning.

House Bill 1100 was introduced last month, sponsored by a slew of local representatives including Sioux Falls Reps. Greg Jamison, Brian Mulder, Tony Venhuizen, Kadyn Wittman, as well as Sen. Steve Kolbeck, R-Brandon.

And in Tuesday morning's House Local Government meeting, council members Alex Jensen and Greg Neitzert expressed support for the bill, alongside Mayor Paul TenHaken, who called in to the meeting.

More: How the confusing, controversial saga of the Delbridge Museum unfolded

Several museums have expressed interest in taking on all or part of the Brockhouse Collection, a group of more than 150 taxidermied mounts housed in the Delbridge Museum — which has been closed since August after detectable levels of arsenic were found on some of the mounts.

A city work group examining various options for the future of the collection has met several times, and recently hired a consulting group to assess the museum's condition, with a report expected this spring.

But any plan that involves keeping the mounts in the museum could be costly. It could take $1 million just to mitigate the arsenic currently on the mounts and create new dioramas for the mounts that can be saved, and another $3 million or more to place the mounts behind glass and upgrade the building's ventilation system.

Creating an all-new space for the museum would obviously be even more costly, which is why the idea of donating parts of the collection has come up.

More: Sioux Falls lawmakers introduce bill that would allow donation of Delbridge specimens

HB 1100 would carve out an exception in state law, which currently says that collections store in a museum can only be donated to a nonprofit that will agree to display or store them in South Dakota, will not dispose of the collection except to return it to the original owner and to return the collection if the organization dissolves.

The bill would add that "A gift of a collection of specimens preserved by a taxidermist is exempt from the requirements of subdivisions (1), (2), and (3) of this section."

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Delbridge Museum taxidermy donation bill heads to House floor