It’s a Dam Site Better for Tourists, but Not for Bill-Payers : Nevada: Hoover Dam visitors won’t swelter in the sun after Wednesday, when $123-million center is due to open. But bureaucrats may feel the heat for exceeding initial estimate by nearly 300%. Power customers will pay.

It’s the grandest visitors’ center by a dam site. Or by any site, for that matter.

Brass railings gleam in the harsh desert sun, partially diffused by the tinted windows imported from Italy. Australian tile lines the floor while state-of-the-art elevators whisk tourists through shafts bored 530 feet into solid rock.

More than a dozen years in the making, Hoover Dam’s visitors’ center finally opens to the public Wednesday at a cost of some $123 million--nearly four times the original estimate and almost as much as the dam itself cost.

“It’s the mother of all visitor centers,” said U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

A complex that began as a way to get tourists out of the sun and safely across the highway that straddles the dam about 35 miles southeast of Las Vegas mushroomed into a project costing nearly as much as one of the city’s hotel-casinos.

By the time it opens to muted fanfare on June 21, the Art Deco-inspired center will have taken twice as long to build as the dam that was the engineering wonder of the Depression.

“I don’t see how anybody can justify spending $120 million on one building,” said Dan Beard, who took over as Bureau of Reclamation commissioner with the project nearly complete. “My overwhelming emotion is to make sure this kind of thing never happens again.”

The center and accompanying parking garage, complete with escalators and a revolving theater, is expected to delight the million or so tourists who annually visit the towering 70-story dam bridging the Colorado River.

Not so happy, however, are power users such as those in the nearby Overton Power District, who will end up footing the bill over the next 50 years.

“Every one of my ratepayers will have to spend $20 a year for the rest of their lives for that center and they don’t even get a free pass to tour the dam,” said Kent Bloomfield of the 4,800-customer utility. “It’s an outrageous waste of money.”

Bureau of Reclamation officials are looking for ways to make up for the huge cost overruns, from increasing the current $4 tour fee to renting out the top of the center overlooking the dam for weddings and other parties.

But in the end, it will most likely be the people who use the power generated from the dam who pick up the tab. To large metropolitan users in Southern California, the cost is negligible. For people in farming communities such as Overton, it will be more expensive.

Overton Power, which gets most of its electricity from the dam, has sued over the rate increases, which will go into effect when the copper-topped visitors’ center officially opens.

But Bloomfield holds out little hope for the suit or for finding out who allowed the costs to balloon.

“They just can’t find anybody to pin the donkey’s tail on,” he said.

The visitors’ center saga is one of deflected blame, although most acknowledge that far too much money was spent to get some tourists out of the sun.

How it happened remains mired in a government bureaucracy that took an initial appropriation of $32 million and exceeded it by more than $90 million--nearly 300%.

“Nobody along the way ever said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Beard said.

“The people didn’t do their jobs and exercise good judgment or restraint with taxpayer dollars.”

Even Reid, who had represented the area as a congressman, didn’t know about the costs of the center until Overton Power users complained to him at a county fair last year.

Reid has since tried to get congressional hearings on the overruns, but concedes there is little that can be done now.

“This wasn’t negligence,” Reid said. “This appears to me to be a calculated effort to accomplish something. It appears some very knowledgeable bureaucrats set out to build this visitors’ center and they did it.”

Plans for a visitors’ center date to the 1970s.

But it wasn’t until a Boulder City resident, Bob Broadbent, became commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in 1983 that a measure was pushed through Congress to authorize its construction.

Broadbent is unapologetic in admitting he pushed hard for the measure, which he said gives Las Vegas a major tourism attraction at little actual cost to taxpayers.

“I would have hoped they would have built it cheaper, but they didn’t,” said Broadbent, now director of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. “But it’s going to be a real major tourist attraction. In a couple of years people won’t be talking about the cost.”

Reclamation officials acknowledge the initial estimate was far too low for early plans, which were soon to escalate after Congress authorized $77 million to refurbish the dam’s massive generators and build the visitors’ center.

When private contractors assumed the cost of refurbishing the generators a few years later, the entire $77 million was granted to the visitors’ center.

“They just said, ‘Hallelujah, we’ve got $77 million for the visitors’ center,’ ” Bloomfield said. “Then they went out and retooled and redesigned the whole facility.”

And a beautiful facility it is. On a recent day, water trickled down a fountain between two escalators that take visitors under a highway and into the center, which at more than 44,000 square feet stretches out on three levels from a canyon wall overlooking Hoover Dam.

Visitors waiting to take the 50-passenger elevators deep inside the dam for a tour will be able to inspect exhibits and sit in a theater that rotates to three different screens or stages to see how the dam was built and how the river’s dam system operates.

Beard, in releasing a report earlier this year detailing spending on the center, called it “a sad chapter in the history of our agency.”

The report blames a lack of supervision of the project’s cost and called original cost estimates “mythical.”

Among the increased costs were $15.7 million for the two tour elevators, nearly $10 million more than estimated, and $22.2 million for a parking garage originally budgeted at $9.9 million.

“Everyone will say we screwed this up from the beginning, and that is true in a sense,” bureau spokesman Bob Walsh said during a recent tour of the facility. “There never was a thorough and true estimate of what this would cost.”