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Capitol Visitor Center
Monday, February 28, 2005
By: Jesse Olczak
Monument to Government Waste
The report that the cost of the Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) is rising again to at least $491 million should bring the wrath of appropriators down on Architect of the Capitol (AoC) Alan Hantman. Better yet, members of Congress should take a good long look at themselves in the mirror, since they are mostly responsible for this monument to their own excess. But don’t expect either of these events to occur without outside-the-Beltway pressure on legislators.
The current “official” CVC cost estimate is $454.8 million, with another $36 million being requested for “unforeseen cost increases associated with construction,” according to the February 28, 2005 CQ Today. The new estimate, if approved, would be $490.8 million, or 85 percent above the original $265 million estimate. However, the Government Accountability Office reported in January, 2005, that the final cost would likely reach $559 million, or 111 percent above that initial estimate.
Any other building project that went that far over budget would elicit the harshest scrutiny from Congress. But the elimination of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, chaired in the last Congress by CVC critic Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) has apparently squelched the last source of internal dissent. Any new hearings would be held at the full committee level, where Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) told CQ Today that he wants to “get to the middle” of the project. That apparently means no one will be getting to the bottom of the five-acre money pit that is becoming the 580,000 square-foot, three-level CVC.
As a result, the CVC will continue to rank among the most wasteful examples of botched construction projects ever promulgated by the federal government. The 40-year old pipe dream was consistently deemed too frivolous to gain wider support until security concerns allowed it to squeak through Congress. The troubling history of the CVC includes the abysmal failure to raise private funds, the abuse of security threats to justify increased expenses, and the unbridled growth of this monument to government waste.
The CVC was initially conceived in a report issued by the Architect of the Capitol (AoC) in 1976, “Toward a Master Plan for the United States Capitol.” This document lay largely dormant until 1991, when Congress appropriated $200,000 for the conceptual planning and design of a visitor center. The initial construction estimate was $71 million, which was supposed by be supplemented by private donations.
The skeptics of this project abounded. On November 5, 1991, then-Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kansas) said, “Our constituents, our visitors, are not asking for this. In fact, I bet each of the 107 million taxpayers in the United States would rather receive a U.S. Treasury check for 75 cents than see us fund the proposal; or better yet, they would like to see the deficit reduced by $71 million.”
Private funds were supposed to come from two primary sources: the sale of coins and private donations. Coin sales raised $3.5 million for the CVC, while the Fund for the Capitol Visitor Center, beginning with a goal of $100 million in private funds, ended up raising a mere $39 million. After several years of efforts, the Fund for the CVC raised only $4 million more than the initial $35 million that was contributed at the fund’s opening by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and Coca-Cola. The American people had spoken, and they had turned down the concept of the CVC.
But that did not stop legislators from pouring hundreds of millions of tax dollars into the ground on the east front of the Capitol.
Early in 1999, Congress asked the AoC to re-validate and update the 1995 design study. The new design focused on four fundamental goals: security, visitor education, visitor comfort, and functional improvements. By January, 2000, the updated design was approved by Congress, and the ceremonial ground breaking took place on June 20, 2000.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent evacuation of the Capitol, security concerns were once again at the forefront of Congress’ agenda. As a result, another $70 million for the CVC was appropriated in the fiscal 2002 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act. In addition, President Bush included $138.5 million more for the CVC in the $20 billion fiscal 2002 Terrorism Supplemental Act. One hundred million dollars of this authorization was for the completion of the center, and the remaining $38.5 million was for security enhancements, including a tunnel to the Library of Congress.
Prior to the September 11th attacks, the Library of Congress attempted to get the tunnel included in the project to increase the paltry number of visitors to their building by siphoning off some of the Capitol’s visitors. In June 2000, Librarian of Congress James Billington pitched the tunnel to a Senate panel as being a way to increase the popularity of the Library of Congress “even [among] those who seldom use libraries” as well as an “all-weather access” point for members of Congress who have get-togethers in the Library.
The “underground access” argument ignores the fact that a tunnel already exists via the Cannon office building and a Library annex. Meanwhile, the security argument overlooks the fact that there are currently multiple tunnels from the Capitol building to the House and Senate office buildings, as well as an additional two-lane truck tunnel that is already part of the CVC project.
Construction of the tunnel has been left for the latter phases of the construction, causing many to predict additional problems when the tunnel work begins. Due to the complex engineering that will be needed to construct the tunnel, Rep. Kingston declared it “a disaster waiting to be dug.”
For example, when utility lines were rerouted early in construction, engineers expected a train tunnel to be 18 feet underground; upon digging, the tunnel was located two feet beneath the surface. The tunnel to the Library of Congress tunnel is expected to be a 600-foot long L-shaped arc in order to avoid obstacles that are actually known by engineers. In the end, this tunnel will probably take longer to navigate than the time it takes to cross First Street and walk from the Capitol to the Library of Congress—the path that legislators have taken for well over a hundred years now.
In the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004, Congress appropriated an additional $48 million to compensate for the increased cost of the project. This addition brought the total to $356.3 million of taxpayer funds allocated for the CVC.
Unfortunately, the additional tax dollars appropriated after 2001 were not solely for security purposes. The plans included:
- A great hall, featuring information and ticketing desks and a spacious area for visitors to view the Capitol Dome through grand skylights;
- A large exhibition gallery, to tell the dual story of the development of representative democracy and the building of the Capitol;
- Two orientation theaters, presenting a specially produced introductory film to prepare visitors for their tour of the Capitol;
- A new dining facility with a capacity for 600 people; and,
- Gift shops.
While increasing funding post-September 11th for security concerns, members of Congress also added another $70 million to build 170,000 square feet of House and Senate office space that has minimal security purposes. This space will be used for: recording studios for both the Senate and the House (a studio already exists in the Capitol); climate-controlled storage for the Senate gift shop and curator’s office; the Senate’s closed-captioning service; rooms for parties and receptions; and possibly the creation of more hideaways small private offices that members can go to when they want to escape their regular office.
Among all the excess, the only project remotely connected to security is the creation of a headquarters for the Office of Senate Security. However, the name is grander than the office’s responsibilities—mainly handling classified documents and providing extra space for the House Intelligence Committee, which already has a room on the fourth floor of the Capitol. Apparently, the current six congressional office buildings with more than 6 million square feet of space are not enough for Congress.
By January, 2003, cost estimates jumped to $421.3 million in a General Accounting Office (GAO, now known as the Government Accountability Office) audit of the project. The audit also warned of the potential for more increases of up to $450 million by the time the project is complete. As of January 2005, the GAO reported the CVC would cost $559 upon completion.
In an interview with ABC World News Tonight on November 24, 2004, Rep. Kingston called this project, “the poster child for Congressional and governmental inefficiency.” Even the prior chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Jim Walsh (R-N.Y.), declared that he opposed the CVC as an “underground Taj Mahal.”
Over the past 14 years, taxpayers have seen the failure of private financing for the CVC, the easy willingness of Congress to pick up the slack with public money, the abuse of security threats to build “grand skylights” and extravagances for members, and the growth of $71 million pipe dream into a $559 million behemoth. Congress has taken taxpayers for one wasteful ride, and the journey is far from over.
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