Boondoggles and secrecy are nothing new when it comes to government.
As we have seen with the California high-speed rail project, politicians are willing to engage in the most elaborate feats of mental gymnastics to justify even the clearest examples of government waste.
California government, as readers of these pages know, is prone to spending binges and allergic to accountability.
It is fitting, then, that all of the worst tendencies of Sacramento have come together in the ongoing Capitol Annex Project which is to provide new offices for state legislators and state officials.
As reported by KCRA 3’s Ashley Zavala in April, the project was estimated in 2018 to cost $543 million to complete.
Fast forward seven years and the project is now double that at $1.1 billion, on par with NFL stadiums.
Indeed, the Legislature has spared no expense to give itself fancy new digs, including spending $5 million to have granite mined in the Central Valley shipped to Italy to be finished into bricks.
It’s only public money, after all, and who cares about that?
What the public knows about the project has been long obscured by non-disclosure agreements thousands have been bound by under the project.
Indeed, even the $1.1 billion cost estimate is out of date and the website devoted to the project (annex.assembly.ca.gov) hasn’t been updated in years. The last legislative hearing on the project is listed on the website as being from March 2021.
A FAQ on the site helpfully notes, “According to the Economic Policy Institute, for every 100 people hired on a construction project, 226 total indirect jobs are created. For every $1 spent, an average of more than $3 are contributed to the economy.”
Well, if it means jobs, then we guess the government can spend whatever it wants.
Obviously, no it doesn’t. The public should know a bit more than what the Legislature has been willing to provide. But all this time later, there’s little transparency.
This past week, Zavala reported that the secrecy has only continued, with public records requests to the Legislature’s Joint Rules Committee being ignored.
“Joint Rules has repeatedly violated the open records law with these requests by not responding within the four-day time frame required under LORA,” reports Zavala. “The committee’s chief administrative officer, Lia Lopez, often takes weeks or even months to acknowledge requests for information.”
Lopez, incidentally, makes $22,976 per month for the hard work of ignoring and dodging records requests about the costs of the project.
In April, the Joint Rules Committee said it would hold a hearing about the project this year, but has yet to say when.
That’s government for you.
“This project is less transparent than some of the top-secret military projects I worked on,” Dick Cowan, a former member of the Historic State Capitol Commission, told Zavala. “But the public’s money? No, that shouldn’t be a secret.”
This likely strikes many of you as an obvious point. But this is California state government we’re talking about.
Transparency and responsibility are challenging to the suits in Sacramento who are counting on Californians being too distracted by other things to care.
If California politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom want to lecture the nation about how to govern, they should demonstrate good government right here. Until then, no one should take their sanctimony seriously.