Duncanville Arts Foundation

Public Report

Sustainability Findings on the Proposed DeFord Collection Acquisition

A review of the financial, institutional, and philanthropic conditions affecting the proposed municipal acquisition of the DeFord Collection of mechanical musical instruments.

Released May 29, 2026 · Duncanville, Texas

The Duncanville Arts Foundation was invited to participate in a community-driven initiative proposing the acquisition of the DeFord Collection. The Foundation’s role in this process was to determine whether an independent nonprofit organization could be sustainable with the Collection at its center, under the financial and institutional conditions identified in the review. This report summarizes the Foundation’s findings, presents the supporting research, and makes the underlying figures and sources available to the organizing committee, City staff, DeFord Collection representatives, and the public.

About the Collection

The DeFord Collection is a privately held assembly of historic mechanical musical instruments, phonographs, music boxes, jukeboxes, and related artifacts, gathered over decades by the late Homer DeFord and held by the DeFord family. The Collection is currently housed at the Olden Year Musical Museum at 1050 North Duncanville Road, Duncanville, Texas 75116, occupying approximately 16,000 square feet and comprising more than 500 objects.

The Collection has been described in family communications and in early planning discussions as a potential foundational cultural asset for Duncanville, with a stated valuation of $3,000,000 pending independent appraisal. The proposed acquisition would route capital authority through the Duncanville Community and Economic Development Corporation, with operating responsibility flowing to the City of Duncanville.

The initiative proposes that the City of Duncanville acquire the DeFord Collection through the Duncanville Community and Economic Development Corporation. The Collection would serve as the basis for an independent museum, with adjacent land acquisition at the current Olden Year Musical Museum site for non-cultural development, anchor placement within the Armstrong Park Cultural District, and a draw for visitor interest. The Foundation’s findings, presented in this report, examine financial structure, institutional infrastructure, and local philanthropic capacity. The Collection’s artistic, historical, and cultural value falls outside the scope of this review.

What the Numbers Show

The review examined three categories of financial obligation: the capital cost of acquisition, the continuing cost of operation, and the relationship between those costs and the local philanthropic and municipal capacity available to support them.

Capital Acquisition

The Collection’s stated value of $3,000,000, amortized over ten years at zero interest, produces an annual acquisition cost of $300,000. Under a debt-financed structure at a 4% effective rate, the annual cost rises to approximately $370,000 and the ten-year total to $3,700,000, an additional $700,000 in interest expense over the period.

Continuing Operating Cost

Once acquired, the Collection requires continuing professional care. The Foundation’s analysis identifies three annual cost components: a fully-loaded curator and collections-management position at $175,000 (based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics national mean annual wage for curators of $71,560, scaled by a standard 2.45 employer benefit and overhead multiplier), a stewardship and conservation reserve at $60,000 (2.0% of stated value, consistent with conservation guidance for specialty collections of historic mechanical objects), and an insurance premium at $15,000 (a planning estimate at 0.5% of stated value pending underwriter quotation). The components sum to $250,000 per year.

This figure is the floor of the annual operating obligation. It does not include facility cost, utilities, security infrastructure, public-facing operations, programming, marketing, administrative overhead, capital reserves, or future acquisitions. Comparable specialty museums in the United States report annual operating budgets between $1,500,000 and $3,500,000 across all categories.

The Multi-Decade View

The $250,000 annual operating cost continues in perpetuity. After the ten-year acquisition period is amortized, the operating cost remains. Across twenty years, the aggregate cost reaches $8,000,000. Across thirty years, $10,500,000. These figures are stated in present-day dollars; at a conservative 2.5% annual escalation reflecting wage growth, materials inflation, and insurance premium trends, the annual obligation reaches approximately $320,000 by year ten, $410,000 by year twenty, and $525,000 by year thirty.

The proposed acquisition is a multi-decade commitment, with operating obligations extending well beyond the ten-year acquisition window.

Local Nonprofit Capacity

The Foundation reviewed the published tax returns of key Duncanville-based nonprofit organizations filing a full IRS Form 990 report. Four organizations qualify.

Organization	Annual Revenue	Annual Expenses	Total Assets
Duncanville Community Theatre 501(c)(3), 1989	$105,000	$88,900	$605,000
Duncanville ISD Education Foundation 501(c)(3), 1996	$189,000	$96,000	$487,000
Duncanville Noon Lions Club 501(c)(4)	$87,700	$80,900	$224,800
Duncanville Chamber of Commerce 501(c)(6)	$247,000	$227,000	$172,000
Combined	$628,700		$1,488,800

The Duncanville Community Theatre and Duncanville ISD Education Foundation are tax-deductible 501(c)(3) public charities. The Duncanville Noon Lions Club is a 501(c)(4) civic league. The Duncanville Chamber of Commerce is a 501(c)(6) business league. The Lions Club and Chamber operate outside the 501(c)(3) framework, and contributions to them are not tax-deductible as charitable gifts, but their published returns help document the full scale of organized nonprofit activity in the community.

Combined annual revenue across all four organizations is $628,700. Combined total assets are $1,488,800. The largest single annual grant-making program documented in Duncanville is the DISD Education Foundation’s long-term distribution of approximately $1,100,000 to the school district over its 27-year operating history, an average of approximately $40,000 per year.

The Foundation’s review identified no Duncanville-based private foundation at a scale sufficient to anchor a major gift toward an acquisition of this size.

One public funding mechanism does support arts activity in Duncanville: the City’s Arts Fund, administered through the Duncanville Arts Commission and supported by Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue alongside other public and private sources. The Commission’s inaugural grant cycle, approved by City Council in September 2025, awarded support across three program categories: Annual Arts Program Grants of up to $20,000 for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, Single Project Support Grants, and Public Art Grants. Individual project awards in the inaugural cycle were generally in the range of $3,000 each. The Arts Fund is designed to support a broad ecosystem of artists, organizations, and projects across the community, with awards distributed through a transparent application process. The fund’s structure makes it unsuitable as a primary or sustained funding source for a single private institution at the scale projected for the DeFord Collection.

What These Figures Mean in Comparison

The Foundation treats local nonprofit capacity as a precedent. What a community has demonstrated it can sustain provides a defensible baseline for what an analyst can reasonably project.

Set against that precedent: the Collection’s first-decade annual cost of $550,000 equals approximately 88% of combined Duncanville nonprofit annual revenue. The continuing operating cost of $250,000 alone equals approximately 40% of combined Duncanville nonprofit annual revenue, sustained in perpetuity. The ten-year aggregate commitment of $5,500,000 is approximately 3.7 times the combined total assets of all four Duncanville nonprofits. The largest local annual grant-making benchmark of $40,000 is approximately one-sixth of the annual operating cost.

These figures establish what local Duncanville nonprofit capacity, as evidenced by published tax filings, can independently support. A sustainable acquisition would require funding sources beyond the local nonprofit landscape, including substantial municipal commitment, major external philanthropic support, or a multi-source funding structure that has yet to be assembled.

Municipal Infrastructure

The Foundation reviewed the institutional infrastructure that professional museum operation requires. A receiving institution typically has four components in place:

These standards are described in published guidance from the American Alliance of Museums, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation.

The available municipal record indicates none of these components is presently in place for the DeFord Collection. The City of Duncanville has not adopted any of the eight standard museum policies in connection with this acquisition, has not established a cultural-affairs administrative function, has not identified museum-credentialed staff, and has not designated a receiving facility. The Foundation makes no judgment about the City’s capacity to develop these components over time. It records what the public record presently contains.

The Armstrong Park Cultural District, established by Council Resolution 2025-423 on February 4, 2025 on a 6–1 vote, is the most directly relevant cultural-policy framework in the City’s record.

This observation provides context for the scale of cultural commitment the City has carried to date. The District’s implementation timeline is a separate matter from the DeFord acquisition, and bears on the question of what an additional cultural commitment of this scale would require.

The Foundation’s Conclusion

Based on the figures, sources, and conditions presented in this report, the Duncanville Arts Foundation has concluded that the resources required to sustain an independent nonprofit organization around the DeFord Collection exceed those currently available within Duncanville’s documented nonprofit and municipal capacity. The financial obligation exceeds documented local nonprofit capacity. The institutional infrastructure required for professional museum operation has yet to be established. The continuing operating cost extends in perpetuity beyond the ten-year acquisition window. Currently identified funding sources leave a gap between projected cost and documented capacity.

This conclusion is specific to the current acquisition approach. The Foundation acknowledges the cultural value of the Collection and the legitimacy of community interest in preserving it. A sustainable path forward, if one is to be pursued, would require a substantially different structure: a major external philanthropic anchor commitment, a dedicated and durable municipal funding stream, formal public-private partnership with enforceable obligations, or a multi-institution model that distributes cost and responsibility across several funded sources. The Foundation expresses no position on whether such a structure can or should be developed.

The Foundation’s role in this matter has been to undertake the analysis, document the sources, present the findings, and make this report available for public review. The Foundation will continue to publish research relevant to cultural investment in Duncanville and to make its analytical work transparent to residents, donors, public officials, and partner institutions.

Methodology

This report draws on planning estimates for acquisition cost, federal labor data for staffing cost, conservation-sector benchmarks for stewardship reserve, industry-standard rates for insurance premium, public municipal record for institutional infrastructure, and publicly available IRS Form 990 reporting for local nonprofit capacity. All figures are stated in present-day dollars and represent planning estimates suitable for institutional discussion. Acquisition figures await independent appraisal. Operating figures await underwriter quotation and a defined operating structure. The Foundation has applied a 2.45 employer benefit and overhead multiplier to base salary in deriving the fully-loaded curator estimate, consistent with standard compensation planning in nonprofit and municipal settings.

The Foundation reviewed key Duncanville-based nonprofit organizations filing a full IRS Form 990 report and verified each through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search and ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Organizations filing the abbreviated 990-N (e-Postcard), which discloses only that revenue is below $50,000, are not included in the capacity analysis because they do not publish the figures necessary to document capacity.

The Foundation’s Role

The Duncanville Arts Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity. The Foundation works in cultural-investment analysis, sustainability review, and the documentation of municipal and philanthropic conditions affecting cultural infrastructure in Duncanville. This report represents the Foundation’s findings on the specific question we were asked to study.

Other professional domains, including legal, tax, accounting, and financial advisory work, are properly addressed by qualified specialists in those fields. Where matters in this work touch on legal, tax, or fiduciary questions, those matters are appropriate for counsel selected by the parties with standing to act on them. The figures, sources, and observations presented in this report are planning estimates suitable for institutional discussion, subject to verification through independent appraisal, underwriter quotation, and additional research as the Collection’s acquisition pathway develops.

The Foundation welcomes inquiries about the analysis and methodology and remains available to support continuing work on cultural infrastructure in Duncanville.

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