Teapot museum is still steeped in controversy.

• Position: Western

Sparta's little teapot museum is short of funds, so it won't be as stout as imagined. And unless it can get a handle on some more money or new contributors, it might not have many, if any, spouts to tout.

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The proposed museum drew widespread attention two years ago when it received $900,000 in state and federal money. Backers said the extensive teapot collection of Los Angeles millionaire Sonny Kamm would draw tourists from the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway to the town of less than 2,000. Critics derided it as wasteful pork-barrel spending. But even with the public money, museum organizers quickly realized they couldn't raise enough to build the $12 million, 30,000-square-foot museum first proposed, so they scaled it back, says Bryan Edwards, town manager and a museum board member.

The revised blueprint shrank floor space to 16,000 square feet, and exhibit space withered to half what Kamm demanded, so he pulled out and stashed his pots in a local warehouse. Though he has loaned a small exhibit to a temporary, storefront museum, organizers are proceeding as if he's out of the picture. "We still have a dialogue with him," Edwards says. "But he is not, at this point...