By Joe Matthews, Zócalo Public Square
Ventura County Star
August 29, 2024

At the very center of state government, you’ll find a hole in the ground demonstrating that the people who make California laws can’t live by them.

That hole is the Capitol Annex Project. The project is supposed to replace a 72-year-old office wing of the Capitol building — the “annex” where governors and legislators had offices — with a 21st-century building. The new annex, like the 1952 annex, would connect to the 19th-century main Capitol building.

Like much of California, the previous annex needed renovation. Décor was drab. Rooms were cramped. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained the bathrooms lacked enough space to  pull his pants down. Lawmakers wanted additional space for hearing rooms and committee staffs; governors wanted a bigger suite for ceremonies and staff meetings.

A renovation-expansion might have met those needs. But in 2018, the state legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown decided to tempt fate, approving a plan to give itself a whole new building.

Six years later, the old annex is gone, but nothing has risen in its place. There is no public date for completion.

Why? People around the Capitol offer different reasons — the pandemic, the care needed to take down a historic building — and the unusual secrecy surrounding the project. Those involved in the annex project were required to sign confidentiality agreements. The project bypassed the Historic State Capitol Commission, which is supposed to oversee the annex and Capitol Park.

As a result of secrecy and delays, no one really knows what the annex will cost. The initial price tag of $445 million has soured to over $1.2 billion in recent, non-public estimates.

No single entity is in charge. A project MOU divides up responsibilities between the state Department of General Service and the legislature’s Joint Rules Committee. People around the Capitol will tell you that the project’s greatest champion, former Assemblymember Ken Cooley is the real decision-maker, even though he left office two years ago. (Cooley told me that he believes strongly in the annex project but is not running it).

The publicly available details of the annex project do not inspire confidence. The design is ahistorical, and could be dangerous. The all-glass façade “offers no protection from gunfire and allows terrorists to see where the CHP is taking the public or the Legislators,” wrote Dick Cowan, a former chair of the Historic State Capitol Commission.

But what’s most galling is the way that state government exempted its own project from the rules that govern building in California.

In 2022, as opponents were making progress in a court challenge to the annex project for violating historic preservation laws, the legislature slipped a last-minute trailer bill into the budget to exempt the project from those rules.

And earlier this summer, the legislature exempted the annex from CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, and from judicial review, after a court found the project was in violation.

Save Our Capitol!, an unincorporated group opposing the project, declared: “Politicians are not above the law, and they should not be permitted to simply undo environmental protections that inconvenience their pet projects.”

Despite the exemptions, construction so far has been limited. Privately, state officials tell me the annex will eventually be built.

I wonder if retreat might be the wiser option. In tough budget times, other state projects could make better use of the $1 billion-plus dedicated to anew annex. And the Capitol does not require an annex. Lawmakers have been working in nearby office space since 2021. They can stay there, or find other offices in the Sacramento area. One project supporter suggests reducing the budget back to the original $445 million, and pursuing a more modest building at that price.

Whatever the fate of the annex, state officials should at least show that they’ve learned a lesson from their own faltering project — and give all other Californians relief from the very laws and regulations that state government itself can’t abide.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.