Local
Costly Capitol Visitor Center finally ready
By: Susan Ferrechio
Chief Congressional Correspondent
December 1, 2008
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| A plaster model of the Statue of Freedom, which was used to cast the statue atop the Capitol Dome, is the centerpiece in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP) |
“They could actually have an educational display on this project ... called the Anatomy of a Congressional Boondoggle,” Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, told The Examiner.
The visitors center will open Tuesday, nearly three years late and $356 million over its original budget. But it will at last provide a much-needed place for the thousands of tourists who flock to the Capitol every day.
The three-level, 580,000-square-foot center includes a 550-seat cafeteria, two gift shops, two theaters, a massive exhibition hall and 26 restrooms. And it will also provide an added layer of security by filtering all visitors into the center for screening before they can enter the Capitol itself.
“The visitors center will help educate our citizens about how our government works, as well as enhance the Capitol building’s security for the thousands of tourists, visitors and employees who enter it each day,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told The Examiner.
But Hoyer and other lawmakers have also sweated over the escalated cost, which rose by the millions year after year for a variety of reasons ranging from a demand from members of Congress for additional office space ($88 million) to the need to shelter 100-year-old trees during the construction process with special sensors and misters ($2 million) to a last-minute decision to change the name of the center’s main hall ($250,000 for new signs).
And the center was not constructed cheaply. Only top-quality materials — bronze, mahogany, marble and granite — were used to build it.
House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., has been so incensed over the visitors center costs that he more than once proposed burying the giant hole dug on the east front of the Capitol and abandoning the project.
Obey, along with Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., staged a news conference in 2006 to give Congress the “Golden Drain Award for pouring taxpayer dollars down the drain” on the project.
Obey called the visitors center “full of glitzy stuff, without addressing the real needs of this institution.”
But most members of Congress have embraced the project despite the steep cost. The Capitol gets nearly 3 million visitors a year who wait outside in the blazing heat, cold or rain for guided group tours and no access to a bathroom or place to eat. The Capitol itself has five public restrooms and no cafeteria fully open to visitors.
The new visitors center will offer more than just food and bathrooms. The theaters and exhibition hall will help give the public a better understanding of how Congress and the government operate and will display historic documents and artifacts that have been kept out of sight for years, such as the platform built to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln and used since for all those who have lain in state in the Rotunda, and the writings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy.
The visitors center will provide “a respectful and dignified way to enter the People’s House,” said acting Capitol Architect Steve T. Ayers.
