LITTLE ROCK — As decision-making goes, it looks like a pretty easy choice to me.
On the one hand you have a $3.5 million tunnel or sky bridge, to be financed out of the initial $6 million outlay for renovating office space over at the state Multi-Agency Complex, a.k.a. Big MAC.
I say initial because once you've build that $3.5 million tunnel linking the state Capitol with Big MAC, what's left won't begin to house 135 lawmakers at the new Arkansas General Assembly Suites and Business Accommodation Grounds, a.k.a. A-GASBAG, in the style to which they would love to become accustomed.
On the other, you have umbrellas. That's what our commendably cost-conscious governor, Mike Beebe, has proposed in place of the tunnel, and it would be an exceptionally brilliant idea even if we weren't still in the throes of a terrible recession of long standing.
A quick Google search for "wholesale umbrellas" turned up a number of prospective vendors. I took the first four listing those 60-inch jobbies and came up with prices ranging from $3.90 to $9.52 per. Mini umbrellas could be had for as low as $1.39 apiece, and 48-inchers fell somewhere in between. Modest volumebuying appreciably reduced the cost in every instance. Who knows what kind of bargains competitive bidding would attract?
Consider this. Every member of the 135-seat Legislature could be outfitted with a mini brolly for only $187.65. Heck, at that rate, the state could afford to provide a 48-inch one to every legislative staff member who has to hand-carry papers between the Capitol and Big MAC-I mean, A-GASBAG-and a few of the 60-inch variety for those who have to push trolleys. There'd be plenty of money left over for visitors to be accommodated, and lawmakers could still afford to put nice carpeting and mini-bars in their offices.
You knew it was coming eventually, didn't you? After all, I've been predicting it for years. Once voters approved annual sessions of the General Assembly, it was only a matter of appropriating the money. Annual sessions were approved in November. The bill appropriating the first $6 million was enacted in April.
The expansion of legislative offices-currently, most senators share offices in the Capitol and most House members do without-will be made possible by federal stimulus money, which will be used to move a number of executive-branch offices out of Big MAC and into the old Dillard's department store building in Downtown Little Rock.
In anticipation of what state Sen. Steve Faris described as "the massive amounts of paper and personnel to move back and forth from committee meetings" in all kinds of weather, lawmakers want to build an enclosed link between the two installations. I guess they don't realize that today's computers and printers can communicate across vast oceans, so communicating across a narrow street and a narrower drive-through should be a snap. No, they want a $3.5 million tunnel.
"No," Beebe sputtered-and who can blame him?-when confronted by reporters about the plan. "We ain't got money for that. I can't see how that's even feasible. What do you got? A 300-foot walk? A 400-foot walk, something like that, to walk from the Capitol to the Big MAC Building? We'll get them some umbrellas if there is bad weather. I'll use an umbrella."
Understand, Beebe's grammar is usually quite good, so the realization that he'd signed the general improvement appropriation bill into law without questioning the $6 million expenditure, which he could have vetoed by drawing a line through it, obviously hit him hard.
Sure, he has to formally release the money or it can't be spent, but as noted by Kim Arnall, assistant director of the Bureau of Legislative Research, it would be rare for a governor to go against the wishes of the Legislature in such a case.
Will Beebe, a former state senator, buck tradition and his former colleagues and refuse to part with the money? Next time you see him, why don't you ask him? He's reported to be undecided.
"No one we can find in our office was part of any meeting that discussed the tunnel," his spokesman, Matt DeCample, told reporters recently. "We plan to make the governor's concern pretty clear. We don't think it'll come to that, that we'll have to block funding to prevent the tunnel from being built."
I wouldn't be so sure. What the Legislature wants the Legislature usually gets.
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Associate editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
Editorial, Pages 77 on 08/23/2009