Museum exhibits need to loan out.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Tar Heel Tattler - Airborne and Special Operations Museum Foundation struggles to pay back $4.5 million loan to city of Fayetteville

No paratrooper worth his jump boots would leap out of a plane and assume someone would hand him his chute on the way down. But that's essentially what the Airborne and Special Operations Museum Foundation did when it borrowed $4.5 million from Fayetteville to finish its museum.

Sandy Klotz, its executive director since July 2000, says board members were told--she doesn't know by whom--that the loan would be forgiven. "The board honestly believed that when it entered into that loan agreement, it would disappear. How that came to be, I'm not positive." City Manager Roger Stand says he figured an airplane manufacturer or wealthy patrons would donate the dough to settle the debt. "That never panned out."

The first annual loan payment of $606,491 came due in October 2001. The deadline was extended a year, but accumulated interest swelled the payment to $868,841. No can do, museum officials told the city. For the year ended in September, the foundation had taken in about $2 million -- about a quarter of it from the Army, which owns the exhibits -- and netted $86,000.

To forgive and forget would make it tough for the city to deal with other debtors and get...