Legislative leaders plan to replace the decades-old desks, chairs and carpet in the Arkansas House chamber and upgrade electrical and voting equipment in time for the 2019 regular session.
The House Management Committee on Tuesday afternoon authorized architect Gary Clements to seek bids on the renovation project for the House chamber, located on the north side of the state Capitol in Little Rock. Clements is president of Clements & Associates of North Little Rock. The work would not begin until after the 2018 fiscal session.
The projected cost of the renovation is about $1.25 million, based on written estimates from Clements and David Ward, operations manager for the voting equipment vendor International Roll-Call of Mechanicsville, Va.
The project will be financed out of the House's maintenance and operations budget, House Chief of Staff Roy Ragland said.
State representatives' desktops date back to the 1960s, Clements said, and the walls and trim were added to the desks in the mid-1980s. The chairs and the carpet in the chamber are from the mid-1980s, House officials said.
"Our goal was to reconstruct the desks as the 1914 design that was never implemented in the House," Clements told the committee.
The state Senate implemented the 1914 design about 10 years ago, he noted. He obtained the old drawings from Capitol historian David Ware, he said later.
The representatives' new desks will be made of white oak, and their desktops will be 18 inches deep instead of 24 inches, Clements said. They'll each have a drawer large enough to hold a laptop and a few other things, he said. Storage containers currently located at the back of the chamber will be removed.
"We have pinched inches everywhere to improve circulation between the desks," Clements said. "The chairs will spin 180 degrees."
The new chairs will be tan. The current chairs are burgundy. The new carpet will be green. The current carpet is largely mauve with strips of gray and beige.
Clements said the rostrum for the House speaker and the parliamentarian will be flattened to eliminate spots that block them from seeing a couple of representatives seated in the chamber.
House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, asked Clements to find out how much it would cost to have the state seal placed on the representatives' chairs.
"It's just information," he said, adding that he's often seen the state seal on the chairs of representatives from other states when he's visited those lawmakers.
House Parliamentarian Buddy Johnson said the House also plans to upgrade the voting equipment hardware as part of the project.
The original plan was to reuse the 20-year-old voting switches, but when the relocation of desks affected the voting system and speakers panel, the House decided to upgrade the remaining portion of the system, according to Clements & Associates' cost estimate.
Ward estimated that it would cost about $240,000 to upgrade the voting hardware, including installing new individual voting switches, integrating with the existing voting software and replacing the current system controls.
Ragland said the House plans to put the project up for bid to contractors in mid-January and to open bids and award a contract in mid-February.
The fiscal session starts Feb. 12 and is limited to a maximum of 45 days under the Arkansas Constitution.
The contractor would have from April 1 to Oct. 1 to complete the project unless there are unforeseen circumstances, Ragland said.
"We have to have done it by Nov. 1," in advance of the House organizational session for the next regular session, which will be in January 2019, he said.
Meanwhile, Ragland said he expects the House's renovation of Rooms 130 and 138 and their adjoining offices on the first floor of the state Capitol to be completed by the end of this month.
In July, the House Management Committee authorized $1.13 million worth of contracts for that renovation project. The project is financed largely with a $981,000 grant awarded earlier this year by the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council from real estate transfer taxes.
The House also renovated Rooms 149 and 151 and nearby legislative offices on the first floor of the state Capitol, after the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council last year awarded a grant totaling $824,000 to help fund that project. Rooms 130, 138, 149 and 151 hadn't undergone significant renovation since the mid-1960s, according to Gillam.
A Section on 12/20/2017