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vate donations and investment income. It has averaged about 1.8 million visitors annually over its 19 years.
• The memorial to the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing derives its $3.3 million operating budget entirely from museum revenues, private fundraising and endowment earnings.
• "We run ours with a very lean staff because that's how we can sustain our memorial and museum," said Kari Watkins, executive director of the Oklahoma City National Memorial.
• The Sept. 11 museum has "a different philosophy and approach," Watkins said, noting that she wasn't critical of it.
• Some Sept. 11 victims' family members are, however. To Jim Riches, a retired fire chief who lost his firefighter son at the trade center, the memorial and museum's projected operating expenses reflect an overblown project that he feels is more tour

ist attraction than tribute.
• "We just want a simple memorial. They want to make this the Metropolitan Museum," he said Monday.
• But other victims' relatives see it as the understandable cost of honoring their loved ones in the ambitious spirit that surrounded the rebuilding in its early days.
• "For me, as a family member, yes, it's a big number, but you know what? It was the worst attack in our country's history. It reflects well what we as a nation will do, and can do. And I'm OK with it," said Lee Ielpi, also a retired firefighter whose firefighter son died in the attacks. Ielpi is on the memorial foundation's board and runs a visitors' center financed by a separate nonprofit group.
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• Associated Press writers David B. Caruso, Verena Dobnik, and Karen Matthews contributed to this report from New York. David Porter contributed from Newark, N.J. Andrew Miga contributed from Washington.
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