March of the Moving Dollies Underway in State Capitol

The state Capitol’s usually tidy hallways were cluttered Tuesday with piles of boxes, stacks of dismantled desks and an occasional framed photograph leaning against a wall.

The still of the legislative session break was interrupted by the thrump, thrump, thrump of heavily laden dollies crossing linoleum tiles.

It was time for the biennial Big Move, magnified this year not just by the unprecedented number of new members--27 of 80 in the Assembly, 13 of 40 in the Senate--but also by the Assembly speaker’s resolve to create more egalitarian offices in a building where work space has historically ranged from the commodious to the closet.

The domino-style upheaval, expected to cost at least half a million dollars, began in earnest this week as eight committees moved out of the Capitol proper and into adjacent office buildings. In some cases, they displaced state agency staff to even more distant digs.

Next week, the remodel begins by wiping out four or five of the smallest offices, including Villa Park Republican Bill Campbell’s 377-square-foot one.

By mid-January, members are expected to move in and start unpacking, stretching the usual Capitol moving days to several moving weeks or perhaps beyond.

“More like moving months,” joked mover Kevin Soulies, who works for the Assembly Rules Committee, which oversees the relocations.

Much of the activity in coming weeks will be of the standard cyclical variety: Assemblyman Dick Floyd (D-Wilmington) lost the chairmanship of the powerful Labor Committee and with it his large suite of offices; Sen. Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood) has ordered maroon carpeting and pink wallpaper that must be installed.

A lot of Tuesday’s action was prompted by Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa’s latest attempt at bipartisan fairness--a vow to strive for a minimum office size. The target now is about 500 square feet.

“You gotta be fair to people; you can’t annihilate them,” said the Los Angeles Democrat.

Everyone knows there still will be more highly coveted offices--rooms in the historic domed part of the building, rooms with unstained carpets, rooms nearer the elevators, rooms with a view.

“At least this will give some dignity to all of the members,” said John Waldie, the Rules Committee’s chief administrative officer.

The remodeling is intended to preempt the Capitol’s infamous office wars.

One of Villaraigosa’s famous predecessors, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, was known for wielding the smaller offices as punishment. When five conservative Democrats rose up against him in 1987, Brown squeezed the Gang of Five into tinier and tinier spaces.

A favorite punitive office was on the sixth floor, a virtual vertical coffin now used as an annex by the Revenue and Taxation Committee. Brown knew that office well: He had once been sentenced to it for failing to back his predecessor, Jess Unruh.

Of course, you can’t really satisfy everyone. Not all committee staff members relish being shoved out of the state’s symbolic nerve center and away from their committee chairmen.

But Brenda Heiser intends to make the best of it.

“There are pros and cons,” said Heiser, secretary of the Assembly Labor Committee, as she watched 19 boxes, three houseplants and miscellaneous office furniture trundled out of her fourth-floor office toward a first-floor one across N Street.

On a daily basis, it means “a lot of trucking back and forth across the street, but it’s a lot easier to get work done,” she said. “You don’t have the walk-in traffic.”