As the estimated completion date of the Capitol Visitor Center (CVC) slipped even further, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) yesterday chided acting Architect of the Capitol (AoC) Stephen Ayers, strongly urging him to get his agency to meet her standards on the project.
“This is a project that needs significant help,” Wasserman Schultz told Ayers at a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s legislative-branch panel. “Significant steps need to be taken to get this project back on track.
{mosads}“I just don’t see that your team has been able to get a handle on this project,” Wasserman Schultz, the panel’s chairwoman, went on, noting that the CVC originally was scheduled to open for the 2005 presidential inauguration, and that now it is uncertain whether it will open in time for the 2009 ceremony.
Though Wasserman Schultz told The Hill that she had a “number of ideas” regarding how to fix the project, she vowed to discuss various options with ranking member Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) before deciding how the committee will address the CVC’s rising price tag and schedule delays.
The AoC said that the CVC’s completion date was postponed from April 2008 by another two months, to June 2008. The center will not be open to the public until Sept. 2008.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the further postponement was attributable to delays in installing a fire-protection system, among other problems.
“Ongoing communication and coordination breakdowns between the contractors and AoC Chief Fire Marshall, as well as the large number of proposed change orders (over 450 as of February 2007), continue to present risks to the project’s completion time frames and costs,” the GAO director of physical infrastructure issues, Terrell Dorn, told the panel.
Change orders, which are changes from the agreed-upon scope or limitations of a project’s work, were a hot topic during the hearing. At the current rate the change orders are being addressed, 20 a month, it would take two years to complete them all.
Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), ranking member of the committee as a whole, asked Ayers to outline the change orders and what the agency is doing to address them.
“My father-in-law was a contractor in the old days, and he would always say to us, ‘Friends, the profit is in the change orders,’” Lewis said. “Please give us as much possible detail for the record how you are trying to reduce those change orders.
“I see them as a major problem as we are building the Taj,” Lewis said, comparing the CVC to the Taj Mahal.
CVC Project Director Douglas Jacobs said that most of the change orders resulted from changes in the scope of the project that happened following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a contractor split.
In addition, Wasserman Schultz scolded Ayers for burying information in weekly CVC update reports, which she requires the agency to submit every Friday.
She said that the AoC had “only mentioned” the date change in an “oblique reference” in the report.
“Why would you have only mentioned that in passing?” Wasserman Schultz asked.
Ayers said that the agency had sent a separate document to the committee notifying it of the change.
The cost estimate would remain at $600 million and the AoC likely would not need to request additional money for fiscal 2008, Dorn said, admitting that a proper cost analysis could not be completed: “The schedule is in too much turmoil to do a cost analysis that you would like to do.”
Dorn continued: “[The schedule] is probably going to slip, but I don’t know how much.”
Wasserman Schultz affirmed her vow to hold the AoC accountable.
“The definition of insanity is making the same mistake over and over again. And I’m not insane,” Wasserman Schultz told The Hill. “I want to take this to a different level now.”
Lewis agreed that Ayers may be in hot water. “You are in a bag of worms here,” he told the architect. “I would hope that we together can one way or another get through this.”