Will a Multi-Million Dollar Man Stop the Muddle?

As dreams of palaces turn into nightmares, Wyoming's Capitol renovation project muddles along to fiscal disaster. After paying millions to design and architectural consultants and having state employees work on the project for more than a year, the committee has decided it's time to hire someone to manage the project. But instead of hiring someone to translate the committee's vision of sugar plums into reality, it should return to the original basic renovation, delete the executive building from the equation and cut out last minute costly niceties.

The Capitol Building Restoration Oversight Group decided to upgrade the basic Capitol building renovation to a fully historic, and in fact, palatial level. During the Oversight committee meeting on July 7, 2015, the architects asked the committee to decide whether they wanted the historical renovation to be an exact replica or a similar-but-simpler renovation. This was apparently not what legislators such as Senator Phil Nicholas expected when the architects promised to return the building to its historical glory, costing a mere 50 percent more than a basic renovation.

During the meeting the committee's discussion turned to how to get the construction managed. But Administration and Information (A&I), the government department with the construction management division, has been—one would imagine, incorrectly it seems—managing the project construction from the beginning. What have they been doing? Senator Nicholas had a few ideas and said "A&I has a different filter from ours." He said, "this is not a criticism of staff—but it is no advocate of the owner."

What a muddle.

To supposedly bring the muddle under control and get what they want at this moment, the committee decided to hire St. Lake City architect David H. Hart and MOCA systems to manage the project. This will not come cheap. According to a Casper Star Tribune article, the new manager's fee will be less than one percent of the cost of the project. The cost, at the moment, sits at just over $300 million. One percent of 300 million is three million. The people of Wyoming have already paid millions of dollars to architects and construction companies, and are already paying construction management to manage the project, and now we are paying yet more so someone else can manage the project too.

But how will a multi-million dollar project manager manage when the committee can decide to turn a basic renovation into the construction of a palace and add costly extras but can't decide on the size of an office?

During the July meeting, Rep.Tim Stubson asked about the allocation of agency office space in Herschler building and who is responsible for it.

Mr. O'Donnell, the government's project coordinator from the Attorney General's office told him that agency space allocation is a decision for the Oversight committee.

Whoa, not so fast. Senator Nicholas, in one of his usual fulsome explanations, told Mr. O'Donnell that it was "not for the oversight committee to do this allocation." Seems, once again, it was for A&I to manage it.

Hey, maybe the new project manager will manage it, but who knows? This mystery may or may not be solved at the August meeting, but don't hold your breath.

Senator Eli Bebout, in a vain effort to provide some guidance to the architects about this very real and practical decision, made a motion to approve the space allocations suggested by the architect so the project could move forward. Nope, the governor and most of the rest of the committee would not agree. Senator Bebout modified his motion to say that the architect's suggestions would be the maximum space allocation, but most of the committee, declining to give any direction to the architect, voted against the motion.

Then Governor Mead stated the obvious during the July meeting: they had been there for one-and-a-half hours and made no decisions.

It appears virtually no one wants to go on record voting for something that may come back to bite them in the future. Given the ability decide to on pie in the sky but not the size of an office, it seems unlikely adding another layer of bureaucracy will clean up this mess. The committee must get its act together and decide to bring this project back to a level the people of Wyoming can afford. Surely the last thing they want for their legacy is debt and higher taxes for our children and grandchildren.