KCRA 3 News
By Ashley Zavala
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —The California Legislature this year quietly spent $5.2 million to have granite mined in the Central Valley, shipped to Italy to be finished into bricks and sent back to the state to be used on a part of the exterior of the eventual new Capitol Annex building.
The stonework, which KCRA 3 was the first to report on Tuesday, is a small part of the $1.2 billion Capitol Annex Project, which will someday house the new offices of state lawmakers, the governor and the lieutenant governor. The project has been at the center of controversy since it started in 2018, with transparency concerns and a lawsuit filed over environmental issues related to the project.
A small group of people inside the Legislature, referred to as the Joint Rules Committee, has been making decisions about several aspects of the project, including the stonework. Multiple sources who spoke on the condition they remain anonymous said the committee's unelected staff, and not the lawmakers, has been doing the decision-making.
In December of last year, the committee moved forward with the stonework project that began early this year. It first involved mining 2 million pounds of granite from a quarry operated by Coldspring in Raymond, California. The granite was then shipped by boat to Italy to be fabricated by the Santucci Group, a company located in Carrara in the central coastal region of the country. Project officials confirmed the rocks were still in the fabrication phase as of Tuesday, with the completed stone expected to return to California later this year.
Project leaders noted the stone should match the exterior of the current historic state capitol's west side. That granite was sourced from Folsom and Penryn, according to the State Capitol Museum.
"It was important that we source this granite for the exterior of the new annex from our state," Lia Lopez, chief administrative officer for the Joint Rules Committee, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, there is not a facility in California that can perform this fabrication work. We considered a U.S.-based facility, but due to the complexity of the fabrication and time constraints, sending the granite to a U.S. facility would have significantly increased costs, which would have resulted in additional spending of taxpayer dollars."
But Lopez and Joint Rules refused to prove that this was the most affordable option, as California faces a budget shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. Over the course of two months, KCRA 3 repeatedly requested the other bids the state received for the work. Those requests have been ignored.
"They should provide some sort of documentation," said long-time lobbyist and McGeorge School of Law professor Chris Micheli. "I can understand there are sensitivities related to contents of a bid, but there's no reason they can't provide some of the information."
The sources, who spoke on the condition they remain anonymous, told KCRA 3 there is a fabricator in Central California who wanted to do the work the state awarded to the Santucci Group. Those sources said Italy could have been the cheaper option because the country does not have the same health, safety and other labor standards that California and the United States expect.
"I think it's hypocritical," said Assemblyman Josh Hoover, R-Folsom.
Hoover, like several other state lawmakers from both parties, told KCRA 3 he had no idea about the stonework.
"This state, in a number of different areas, requires certain things, requires certain standards. But when the Legislature itself wants to do a project, it does not want to follow those standards," Hoover said.
KCRA 3 reached out to the Labor Committee leaders in the assembly and Senate, including Democratic Assemblymember Liz Ortega and state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, but both declined to comment as of Tuesday night.
KCRA 3 also reached out to the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California and the California Construction and Industrial Materials Association for comment but did not hear back from either as of Tuesday night.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose Department of General Services is also a leader of the project, did not respond to a request for comment as of Tuesday night.
It has been more than three years since the California Legislature held a hearing on the status of the Capitol Annex Project, according to the project website. It has also been years since the website, meant to provide public information about the project, has been updated.
This summer, the Democratic-led Legislature voted to exempt the project from the California Environmental Quality Act, as it has been tied up in litigation over that same law for the last three years. That lawsuit was filed by a group led by Dick Cowan, the former chairman of the Historic State Capitol Commission, who resigned as the annex plan evolved.
"It does sound like a decision that certainly will raise some eyebrows," Cowan told KCRA 3 in response to the stonework.
Joint Rules has blamed the lawsuit for its inability to provide more public information about the project.
"At the direction of counsel, Joint Rules cannot discuss the Annex project — beyond information disclosed pursuant to Legislative Open Records Act requests — due to ongoing litigation," Joint Rules said in a statement. "We know this is frustrating for the public, and also for journalists, who are doing their best to provide accurate information to their readers and viewers. We are eager to share more about the project, and hope that we can do this very soon."
"The litigation is on environmental aspects of the project," Hoover said. "To blame the lack of transparency on the lawsuit is disingenuous."
