The county board of supervisors voted Tuesday to approve the current building plan and release $117.5 million in taxpayer funding for it, despite last-minute entreaties from some art and architecture critics who urged the board to vote against the project.

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Nicolas Berggruen, a museum trustee, who is also building a research group known as the Berggruen Institute near the Getty Center, said focusing on square footage — which shifted over time, in part because of environmental concerns — misses the point.

“The truth is, something a bit bigger might be better, but it would be a shame not to go ahead with the building. Stopping this project would be bad for the museum and bad for the civic fabric of L.A.; it would show that L.A. can’t get its act together in terms of its cultural future.”

One reason the stakes are so high is that Los Angeles has historically been home to few great examples of public architecture.

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[Critic] Joseph Giovannini wrote that the museum would be assuming an “unprecedented and unconscionable” amount of debt. In his fourth article on the subject in the Los Angeles Review of Books, he notes that Lacma already carries $343 million in debt.

Addressing the question of how much debt is too much, Mr. Govan cited the institution’s “A2 stable rating by Moody’s.”

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