Three-year-old Lito calls the Santa Fe Children's Museum "my museum." He visits his mother at work there and plays with the exhibits. His mom, Anna Marie Tutera Manriquez, is the museum's executive director and she can't get enough of him being around her at work.

"It's satisfying and fulfilling knowing that he is growing up in a museum environment," Tutera Manriquez said.

The museum has been a staple for local school field trips for years, but now, with city budget cuts to transportation over the past three years, many kids, especially on the south side of town, indirectly are being restricted from visiting places like the children's museum downtown.

"We took quite a hit this year," said Terrie Rodriguez, the city of Santa Fe's Youth and Family Services Division director. "We're having half as many field trips out of town and we're also down one van and one van driver."

The Randall Davey Audubon Center is another nonprofit geographically separated from many south-side families. The center is on Upper Canyon Road, three miles from the closest bus stop. Although the center arranges for school buses to bring loads of kids from around the area during the academic year, it's difficult for staff to advise families on how to treat their kids to summer camps or trips outside of school.

So, 2 1/2 years ago, the nature center began an education and scholarship fund with the purpose of eliminating the cost-prohibitive aspects of getting students to the center.

"Even with that, we find that there are many students who just can't get from their homes to our site for camps," said Karyn Stockdale, Audubon center executive director.

Specifically for kids programs this summer, options may be limited because of the lack of available transportation to programs in downtown Santa Fe. The Santa Fe Community Services department said that its programs at various public schools around town are full and most have a waiting line 30 deep.

The city also is trying to accommodate the 40 girls who no longer have the Girls Inc. location at Zona del Sol to attend. Even if parents were willing to let their kids take the public bus system, which is free to them, they would have to walk a considerable distance once downtown to get to the Children's Museum summer camp, in its first year of existence. The closest bus stop to the museum is about five blocks away.

"We are a public institution that has no public transportation access," Tutera Manriquez said.

The museum has investigated alternate forms of providing south-side families access to its services, but all are costly.

It would cost roughly $600,000 to $700,000 to open a south-side satellite museum, or a "museum on wheels" program that could be moved around town. Although the museum has lobbied the city for more transportation funds, the city's response has been that the museum has not demonstrated the need.

The number of children attending the museum has sharply declined in the last three years. From 2009 to April 15 of this year, 6,125 youngsters attended the museum. That's down 3,808 visits from 2006 to 2008.