Now that Charles Young has addressed the deficit at LA MoCA by cutting the staff 20%, he has set out to address the issue of the nine (out of 35) board members who fled, according to Mike Boehm posting on the LA Times’s Culture Monster blog.

But Young added that he hadn’t given up hope of retaining others who left because they were unhappy about how the museum had handled its finances or how recent decisions were made.

“We can tell them we are curing the deficit — or have it pretty well cured — and that the board will be involved in all the issues it should be involved in and base its decisions on full and complete information,” Young said. “I think some have agreed to at least reconsider, depending in part on whether we are truly going to do what I told them we are going to do.”

Young said MOCA leaders are determined to build the board back up; he declined to say how much members are required to pledge in annual donations. The museum’s annual budget was pared from more than $20 million to about $16 million with last week’s announcement that 16 full-time and 16 part-time staffers had been cut. MOCA has relied on donations for most of its budget. Every trustee of the much larger Los Angeles County Museum of Art is expected to make an annual gift to LACMA of at least $100,000.

MOCA Board’s Exodus; Nine Members Have Left (LA Times/Culture Monster)