By Staff
Did you see where Congress has spent $600 million building a boondoggle to itself? And it's not done yet!
The underground Capitol VIsitors Center has cost nine times what was expected, it's three years behind schedule and they're still not sure whether it will be open by the middle of 2008.
The fact this too-real civics lesson was even undertaken doesn't seem to have been well-publicized, but then who remembers all the details of 16 years ago?
According to a report in the March 25 Detroit Free Press, the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center contains 580,000 square feet. By comparison, Detroit's Cobo Center totals 720,000 square feet.
It must have sounded simple in 1991 as a $71 million undertaking.
There are 3 million annual visitors to the Capitol, yet there was no place for them to wait to get inside except outside in the rain or Washington's notorious summer humidity.
Plus, there was no central location for sharing the story of Congress with tourists.
Costs ballooned $140 million for security reasons. First, a gunman killed two Capitol Police officers in 1998.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
As members of Congress learned of the existence of new subterranean space, they began filling it with the same zeal usually reserved for packing a war funding bill with pork, including reserving 170,000 of the 580,000 square feet for their own use, including a 3,500-square-foot hearing room, a recording studio and climate-controlled storage for the Senate gift shop. That padded another $70 million onto the bottom line.
Congress also bestowed on the space a grandeur befitting its institutional sense of entitlement – granite, marble, bronze, skylights for glimpsing the Capitol dome, spiral staircases and, in that bicameral spirit, two gifts shops and two theaters – one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate.
The over-budget, behind-schedule center offers the perfect monument to post-Sept. 11 Washington, according to David Williams, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group critical of government overspending.
"Walking up those marble steps was awe-inspiring and simple," Williams said. "It spoke a lot to what this country was about … The visitor center takes away from the Capitol experience a lot more than it adds."
A ground-level driveway is being replaced with a plaza replete with reflecting pools, benches and gardens.
"A little palatial for my tastes," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who recently took over a subcommittee overseeing the project. "It could have been accomplished for less money on a less grand scale."
Yes, but then it wouldn't have been worthy of how Congress sees itself when it can keep tapping the taxpayer trough time and time again.