Top Takeaways from Full Committee Hearing with The Architect of the Capitol

WASHINGTON - Yesterday, the Committee on House Administration held a Full Committee Hearing titled, "Oversight of the Architect of the Capitol: Addressing Past Lessons, Present Projects, and Future Challenges."

Witness:

• The Honorable Thomas Austin, Architect of the Capitol

In case you missed it, here are the top takeaways:

Chairman Bryan Steil (WI-01): So if I can, let's look forward. Obviously, large cost numbers in these buildings. What's the driver in this significance of the cost that we're seeing? Obviously, we're not going to use lead and asbestos and other things in modern construction. But what's the driver and the large kind of eye-popping number to redo Rayburn?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: Thank you sir. So part of this is put it in context. The Rayburn House Office Building is the largest office building on campus by large stretches, over 2.3 million square feet of facilities all by itself. So it is the largest building on campus just in terms of gross square feet. So it's the size issue as part of that. But it also has what we just spoke about. You said lead and asbestos. Those all have to be remediated and removed and encapsulated depending on where we're talking about it. But some of the other cost drivers are just the operations of Congress. We need to maintain at least some portion of the facility because of lack of swing space. So we need to be able to maintain security and environmental controls and all these things in the building while some of it's being renovated and some of it's being used by Congress for committee hearings and regular operations of Congress. And then we have just challenges we have here on campus, security challenges, historic preservation challenges, all of these things and visitor access, these all add multiples to what would normally be considered your price per square foot. But all these things add up to the cost of this project. So some of it is the scale, some of it's the historic preservation, security, member access. And just in order to keep this building operational while it's being renovated.

2. Closing Out the Cannon Renewal Project

Rep. Greg Murphy (NC-03): I want to go back on the Cannon issue. So, how much was that over budget?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: So the original midpoint of the budget estimate was about $750 million. We're coming in at $971 overall.

Rep. Greg Murphy (NC-03): Okay. So almost a quarter million dollars over. How about timing? How long overrun was it?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: The short answer to the question, it was not, because the office spaces were tied to the Congressional move cycle. In all four phases, we were able to turn over every suite on time so it could be a part of the move cycle. We did, to your point, though, we did move some of the ancillary features and portions of the project to the tail end of the program overall, so that we could make those accelerated turnover with the suites. So there are certain things that went to the end of the project, but the primary features of the project were turned over on time.

Rep. Greg Murphy (NC-03): So, if you had to pick out one thing or top two things, the primary cost overruns, what was the issue?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: I would say there's several things. I'd say it's part of the enduring lessons we learned from the project. I would say one of the things was change management issues when we first started the project. We allowed kind of a low threshold for changes, and we got a lot of changes that came in from Congress, some of the changes that came just because part of the design. And so we want to have a higher bar for future projects with change management, a higher threshold to make those changes.

The Honorable Thomas Austin: So thank you for the question. This is something that we've been addressing. We have identified two locations inside the CVC, one on the Senate side of CVC, one on the House. We have program money in this year's bill. We're awaiting authorization from both the House and Senate, because in the CVC it's joint space in order to proceed with the design of it. Those upgrades, it's as you know, Congressman, those are more significant than just, say, a baby changing station. It requires electrical, plumbing, there's some structural concerns, and just the size of it.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA-09): Right. I mean, for the viewers back home, when you're talking about an adult child, you can't just put them on one of the changing stations that you find in your basic highway rest area, you've got to have a whole room and it's got to be dedicated and you've got lots of different types of disabilities you have to take into account. So, I'm not thinking it would be something easy, but you're right. It takes a lot. But do you think we can get it done?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: I think we can get it done. Again, we have the program in order to do the design this year, just waiting on approval. But I don't expect that to be an issue.

Rep. Mary Miller (IL-15): What's your most complicated issue, your biggest challenge and how can we help you?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: I would say the facilities condition in general, the committee has been very helpful as we've been designing the Rayburn project. I'd say my Rayburn program overall, how we go about it, the means, the methods, the swing space, the phasing and all that is something that's been my biggest challenge is to get a firm course of action so that we can start moving forward on that project. As I spoke about earlier, time is of the essence when it comes to that. And it's because as these system failures keep increasing in frequency and severity, that's going to start impacting Members of Congress more and more. And I am keen to avoid that, and I'm keen to get ahead of it as much as possible.

Rep. Mary Miller (IL-15): And how do you facilitate proactive maintenance in order to prevent reactive maintenance on the Capitol grounds?

The Honorable Thomas Austin: So I will say a shout out to my staff as they do a great job keeping abreast of facility issues as much as they possibly can. Some things that are hidden behind our walls, like our HVAC issues or plumbing, electrical, some of those things don't show up until they show up and we have an issue. But some things, we talk about preventive maintenance with our HVAC systems, preventive maintenance when it comes to our some of our plumbing components, they do a great job of doing that. We do over half a million work orders a year throughout the Capitol campus. The Ranking Member spoke about just the plumbing and some of the hydraulic issues we have inside campus. It's a constant challenge. We do a great job of tracking it. Our on-time work order is over 95% these days. And we want to make sure that we're staying abreast of those and doing great data tracking, great predictive maintenance by utilizing the feedback systems we have with our maintenance systems.