Ranking Member Morelle Questions Architect of the Capitol During Hearing

Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, I appreciate the stress on the air handling systems. I think I was designed for about 30 years. I'm way past my useful time as well, so I know the pain and suffering of that. So I'm just curious, sort of following up with the Chair's question, but I want to back up. In layperson's terms, when people use the phrase catastrophic system failure, it sounds frightening, and it does suggest, obviously, a significant risk. But what does that mean? What would it look like if there was a catastrophic system failure that we're at risk of? So the way we define catastrophic system failure, is any failure of one of the building's systems, specifically the mechanical, electrical, or plumbing systems, that would cause part or all of the building to become unusable for the function it was intended, in this case, the operations of Congress. I think probably the easiest way to describe a failure that happened just this past year, happened this past October, where one of those air handling units did indeed fail. It threw a bearing, and that caused the motor to run asynchronous, caused a lot of vibrations. Credit to the House Office Building's team that they caught it early before the air handler rattled itself to pieces or even caused a friction fire. But that failure of just that one component caused over 22 suites to be without conditioned air at that time. And because those air handling units are so old, that we don't have components made for them anymore, they had to be custom fabricated in order to repair it. It took about six weeks. But we got lucky. Number one, the mechanics saw it early, caught it early, less damage. Number two was it was a temperate time of the year, and in this particular case, Congress was mostly out of session, so the impact of membership was slight. But it had that happen in June or July or say January, when the conditions were more extreme. That was office, it was those 22 suites and other associated spaces would have been unusable for that period of time. And we would have either had to mitigate it with expensive temporary fixes, or we'd have to relocate staff into ad hoc facilities. And should that happen, I assume you have contingency plans where staff would go, but it's got to be limited, right? I mean, if you lost 50 suites, I mean, obviously, each additional office that is put out of the office just complicates this more. But do you have contingency plans? And how many people could you relocate, given your existing physical structures? This is something we certainly want to work closely with this committee, as well as House leadership as to what is in the realm of possible when we come to contingency. Currently, there are only four swing space suites available for normal operations. Things that happen like we have these floods that we described earlier, when we have to relocate members and staff to different facilities, there's only four of those. We have had a system, a failure like we just talked about with 22. We would have had to come up with, I would say, ad hoc solutions, utilizing committee spaces, utilizing hearing room, utilizing other common spaces, so that members of Congress could continue to do their function. So, but we look forward to continuing this conversation, both with this committee, to identify additional spaces. Yeah, do any of these pose, I mean, you mentioned electrical, you mentioned the possibility of fire. I mean, those are health and safety risks to staff, members, visitors who are here. Is that right? Well, I would say that the facility, I want to ensure for people who work in these buildings, these facilities are safe to be in. You know, all the hazards we talked about were encapsulated, so there's really only an issue when we try to do renovations, where we have some kind of, you know, major leak or something like this. However, really, the challenge is operations. We are at risk of having operations failures for these buildings, less so safety failures. Yeah. You mentioned the number of HVAC-related and pipe leaks. Is that number gone up over time? Is that, can you give me a sense of the numbers and quantify the growing risk, growing problem? Sure. You're absolutely right. It has gone up over time. We're, as these facilities age, and we kind of reach this, this tipping point, where we start having increasing number of failures as all these systems age out and they start having a series of failures on top of each other. So that number has gone up over the past year. Just over the past, over the just past 12 months, we've had 16 major leaks. They impacted six member suites, four committee office spaces, five member storage areas, and two hallways. Each one of those required millions of dollars remediate, or not each one, but collectively they required millions of dollars remediation and repairs, and that just got us back to where we started. So yes, they are increasing. And so we should anticipate even greater numbers if we don't address this. You had mentioned swing space. Assume the goal is, and I think in our conversations we've all had this discussion, that that would make those offices that you build in swing space, we would build a new building, swing space would be used, but that would be available then for the house to be able to use once the project is completed and people have moved back into Rayburn. It still would allow us to be able to make use of that space obviously into the future. Absolutely. Yes, that would be permanent space to be utilized at the direction of Congress. Certainly as swing space for future renovations, as the chairman pointed out, for the Longworth renovation that would happen subsequent to Rayburn. But also we rent on the, we lease on the house side hundreds of thousands of square feet of other facilities that could be reshored back onto the capital campus, but it would also be available for use by Congress, however they decide. Thank you for indulgence. I yield back.