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December 14, 2005
A dangerous building, a treacherous stereotype
In that first report, a television report, I used footage of the structural problems. The floors were so warped that when a state worker put a toy car on his desk it rolled off. File drawers came open of their own accord and pencils rolled off supposedly flat surfaces. There were splotches of mold on ceiling tiles where water had seeped through. The ventilation was lousy, the windows were not waterproof, the foundation was faulty, beams were eroding. People who worked in the building got sick and sometimes the entire place was emptied and workers sent home because of conditions in the structure. And what I remember best is that I kept encountering officials who were dismissive of the problem, who said the state employees who worked in the building were either inventing the problems or were hypochondriacs or were malingerers. The state poured money into the building over the years, retooling and renovating it. The alternative was to believe the workers. Now, 30 years after it was built the state is finally giving up. All state workers will be moved out of the building and the next Legislature will be asked for money to tear it down. (Gov. Kenny Guinn supported demolition at the last Legislature but foresight is not a legislative function.) Perhaps it will fall down of its own accord, because it turns out - of course - that the Kinkead is also seismically unsafe. John Kinkead was governor both of Nevada and Alaska. One hopes there is no Kinkead building in earthquake-prone Alaska. What are the consequences of putting state workers inside a musty building for three decades? Will their health ever be the same? How much did they lay out in medical bills? This week I called Bob Gagnier, once the director of the state workers union and now retired and working in a lumberyard for a lark. He recalled one day when it was raining - outside the building, not inside, though it was not always possible to tell the difference. Water was flowing freely on the walls and through the floors of the Kinkead. Gagnier got on the phone and called Richard Bryan, then the governor. The two met at the Kinkead and Gagnier showed Bryan the problems firsthand. Seeing what the workers faced through his own eyes and not through an aide's briefing memo was educational for Bryan. He sent the workers home that day. Originally, the Kinkead was supposed to be a 10-story building, but between the time of the legislative appropriation and the start of construction, post-Vietnam inflation ravaged the funding and the size of the building was reduced. "They couldn't build the 10 stories," Gagnier said. "They couldn't even build eight or seven. All we got was six. And we could only imagine where all they cut corners. Some people swore that the windows were put in backwards. I don't know. All I know is it's been a piece of crap since the day they moved into it." But what is most troubling about the tale of the Kinkead was the way the complaints of state workers were trivialized in the early years of the dispute. Public employees are so thoroughly demonized in the public mind that it was easy to let the problem ride for a while. Those people at the public trough, those lazy idlers who shuffle papers and waste taxpayer dollars - they can safely be ignored. With the exception of the seismic instability, everything we know about the Kinkead today state workers knew a quarter of a century ago. It's a shame we didn't listen to them then. Myers is a veteran capital reporter. His column, "Against the Grain," appears here on Wednesdays. |
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