New offices nearly ready for senators

Right on schedule, the new Senate office building is ready for senators and other staff to start moving in after New Year’s Day.

With less than two weeks remaining in 2015, workers are busy touching up ceilings and rolling out office chairs. All that will be missing when the building opens in 2016 will be Republicans and the flawless cellphone reception some might have hoped for.

Senate Republicans, who opposed the building’s $89.6 million expense, have opted to stay put for the time being in their temporary quarters at the State Office Building. That means a stretch of offices waiting for them in the new building will remain vacant in the coming months.

Meanwhile, a kerfuffle over the strength of cellphone service in the building appears headed toward at least medium-term resolution.

Members of the Advisory Committee on Capitol Security learned at their Dec. 11 meeting that service was spotty, varying by carrier and area of the building. Of particular concern: a dead zone near the sergeant-at-arms office.

Wayne Waslaski, director of real estate and construction services at the Department of Administration, said in an interview that efforts to get the entire Capitol area campus of 20 buildings covered by a distributed antenna system (DAS) through a bidding process had so far proved unsuccessful. That’s still the long-term solution he is hoping for, but in the meantime Waslaski said negotiations are underway with carriers to install their own headend equipment to boost reception in the new Senate building.

The upshot is that for the time being most people will find cellphone service in the new building to be about the same as in the Capitol or State Office Building — “semi-crappy,” in the words of the building’s project manager for the Senate, Vic Thorstenson.

A visit last Friday to perform an informal test of the building’s current cellphone reception — at Thorstenson’s invitation — turned into a full building tour that provided a glimpse of the near-finished interior, from the lobby to behind-the-scenes spaces.

A few highlights and quirks from a spin through the Capitol campus’s newest structure:

• Above the Senate information desk in the main lobby overlooking the Capitol’s north face are individual letters spelling out “Minnesota Senate” in an idiosyncratic typeface that Thorstenson said isn’t a typeface at all. Rather, they are copies of letters from the hand-painted inscription high above the south wall of the Senate chamber in the Capitol. Thorstenson photographed the inscription and converted the individual letters to vectors the sign maker could follow, right down to an unevenly shaped letter “O.” A time-saving shortcut, he said, is that each letter of the word “Senate” can be also found in “Minnesota.”
• Arrayed in the new hearing room the Senate will use as its temporary chamber during the Capitol renovation project are members’ original desks from their chamber in the Capitol. Thorstenson pointed out that the brighter light of the new space reveals bumps and nicks in the desks’ ornate woodwork that are hidden in the dimmer Capitol lighting. Each desk has a senator’s mugshot propped on top for easy identification — Thorstenson said he wasn’t sure who had put them there. Even the face of a now-former senator, Branden Petersen, graced the temporary chamber.
• A second, similarly sized hearing room (seating 150) includes a feature he said was suggested by Sen. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope: video screens visible from the rostrum but hidden from audience view on the back side of a testifier’s table. (Bigger screens face the audience.) A third hearing room that seats 250 was the runner-up for hosting the House of Representatives. (House leaders are opting to hold floor sessions in their Capitol chamber.)
• Among the earliest users of the new building are staff from Senate Media Services, who have been training to use twin production rooms that will allow broadcasting of video from two hearings at once. (The first scheduled use of the building in the new year is a Humphrey Forum event on Jan. 15.)
• Wide spaces throughout the building are meant to accommodate large groups of visitors to the Capitol, including “Day on the Hill” lobbying events, with some areas currently resembling airport terminals. One area with large windows facing west has earned the nickname “Castle View” — it looks out over the nearby White Castle restaurant.
• As originally designed, each senator’s office along the building’s curved south face is equidistant from the Capitol rotunda. The building’s program changed to accommodate all senators’ offices instead of only non-committee chairs, meaning some have offices that don’t face the Capitol — but do contain 10 extra square feet. Both caucus leaders have opted to move into corner offices at either end of the curved wall, in rooms that were originally going to be conference rooms.

As for the informal test results: Verizon’s signal was generally moderate-to-strong throughout the building on an iPhone, sinking to one bar only near the sergeant-at-arms office. The same carrier’s service, on Thorstenson’s rare Windows phone, was not quite as good, losing the signal here and there.

And with that Thorstenson was off to a meeting — with someone from T-Mobile.

RELATED CONTENT:

• Senate GOP to stay put, spurn new building
• Cozier alcoves next House session?