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Pat Harris has been busy lately overseeing the Legislature’s project to build the newest Statehouse in the nation with the expectation that he will continue to serve in the third facility to host Alabama’s legislative body.
Harris has served as secretary of the Alabama Senate for nearly 15 years, but has been working within the legislative environment for more than five decades, starting in the Old Capitol building on Goat Hill in the 1971.
The job comes with a variety of roles; Harris also oversaw the recent redesign of the Legislature website and is in charge of making sure the Senate’s bill filing system runs smoothly. But the average citizen likely couldn’t say who Harris is or what he does.
“You know, it’s funny when you say that people don’t know what I do or what the role is: that’s good,” Harris said. “That means we don’t have any problems. We have very few problems because nobody’s been thinking ‘Well, you can do this better’ … We don’t have those kinds of problems because things are working, because of the people and the staff that we have in Alabama which is, I think, by far the best in the country.”
The piece of Harris’ job with the most public interest currently is his presiding over the construction of a new statehouse, partnering with Retirement Systems of Alabama, which has experience building facilities of this magnitude.
There has been much coverage of those plans, which include construction of a seven-story building on what once served as a parking lot for Statehouse staff and the press and the demolition of the current Statehouse for green space.
But Harris got into some of the nitty-gritty details with APR about how the facility might better serve the public, press and lawmakers.
One important feature of the new facility will be the improvement of committee rooms.
In the Statehouse being used today, many committees have to meet in small rooms with little access to the public, and perhaps more importantly, no livestream capabilities. Whether by chance or maneuvering, some of the biggest committee votes and discussions of recent legislative sessions have found their way into these small, unstreamed rooms. Since the Legislature does not take detailed record of committee meetings, this can leave the public and even the press unable to properly observe or record how lawmakers voted at the committee level.
That won’t be a problem in the new statehouse, Harris said, with all committee rooms being designed with plenty of public seating and livestream capability.
“One of the concerns we had about this building and the need for a new Statehouse was the transparency and what the public had access to, either in the building or outside of the building,” Harris said. “So all the committee rooms will have live stream, which they do not have now …. Not only that, but the committee rooms will be much bigger so that we can accommodate more in-person people who want to come and actually be there.”
Harris said the new facility will also be more secure while providing better public access. The current building originally housed the Alabama Department fo Transportation and therefore is not designed with the functions of a legislative facility in mind.
“It’s a challenge to build a new Statehouse, because you’re not just building an office building; you’ve got these big public areas that you want the people of Alabama to be very proud of and see,” Harris said. “But then you’ve also got work areas, which are offices, so it’s a combination fo very public areas, private areas, some areas that are a combination of both, you’ve got to have access to the public, access to the press, access to all of the school kids that are coming in and out. So combining all those things is a challenge.”
The current Statehouse has 12 to 15 points of access, which Harris said is a “security nightmare,” but the new facility will have only five points of entry. There will be only one public point of entry, the same as the current Statehouse, but it will be designed to accommodate many more people so that lines aren’t backing up out of the building like they sometimes do now.
Also helping congestion will be more elevator access. The existing Statehouse has three public elevators; the new facility will have twice that with six elevators.
Harris said RSA are elevator experts that will have that system running as smoothly as anyone could hope.
“They know how to stage and make elevators work, how long they need to on one floor and move to the next, which floor they need to stage on,” Harris said. “And because their building division owns so many elevators from New York to Alabama, when they call for an elevator part, the elevator company shows up that day.”
When an elevator at the current facility needs to be repaired, someone has to custom-build a part because the elevators are so old that the parts are no longer made.
Harris is hopeful that the new facility will make the work of the Legislature only that much smoother, and people will continue to wonder what, exactly, his office does.
