One of the least popular new buildings in Washington has been named after one of the nation’s most popular presidents.
“I hate it,” said Mike Reagan, former President Ronald Reagan’s son. “If my father were to know that a new government building, second only to the Pentagon (in size), has his name on it he would go nuts.”
The L-shaped Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center is a 3.1 million-square-foot colossus that sprawls across an 11-acre site. It has eight above-ground stories and five underground that house a 1,900-vehicle parking garage.
The price tag: $738 million.
Think of the complex as a horizontal skyscraper–with each floor averaging about 190,000 square feet.
If the building were a tower with 20,000-square-foot floors, it would be 155 stories tall and 1 1/2 times the size of the Empire State Building. Its 250,000 cubic yards of concrete would pave 106 miles of two-lane highway.
The mammoth building eventually will be home to about 7,000 federal workers by the time it is finished sometime next year. It also houses restaurants, a 980-seat food court and an international trade center, a private venture that includes office space, a 650-seat auditorium, exhibit hall and a skyline rotunda for receptions and other social events.
The occupants appear to come from a hit list of alphabet-soup government agencies that conservatives love to hate. Among them are the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Customs Service.
Officials at the General Services Administration, the government’s developer, said the building is getting a bad rap.
“This was an opportunity to consolidate government agencies in one location,” said Robert C. Hixon Jr., the GSA’s project executive.
Hixon contends that the Ronald Reagan Building eventually will be a money saver as government workers vacate commercially leased space. He said the structure also is the final installment in a project to restore Pennsylvania Avenue, envisioned 40 years ago by President John Kennedy.
Hixon acknowledges that the building will lose money during its first nine years. Government agencies are paying annual rents of $43 a square foot–a rate at the high end for top commercial space in Washington–to help make a $64 million annual mortgage payment.
But at least one commercial venture sees the project as more than a high-priced behemoth.
“We think it is viable, and that is why we went after this contract,” said Brian Dacey, managing director of Trade Center Management Associates, which will occupy about 25 percent of the building.
The trade center will include a mix of private companies, trade associations, government agencies and a facility to distribute information on international investment opportunities.
Republicans do not share Dacey’s enthusiasm for the government-private sector partnership.
Mike Reagan said he would rather see his father’s likeness on Mount Rushmore and the new building renamed “Mount Wastemore.” And several Republicans share Mike Reagan’s horror that the biggest federal building in decades was named after a president who hated big government.
“It is a monument to Democratic excess and how the expansion of Washington, D.C., has engulfed our society with bureaucrats,” said Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas).
Not everyone in the Reagan family agrees, as a spokesman issued a statement saying the former president and wife Nancy “are honored” it carries his name.
And there are plenty of Republican fingerprints on the building.
It was authorized in 1987, during Reagan’s presidency, and work began under President George Bush. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), introduced legislation naming the building for Reagan in 1994 after the 40th president announced he has Alzheimer’s disease.
Before groundbreaking, one engineer estimated the building would cost $362 million, a figure GSA officials contend was just a hunch. Critics have seized on that price tag to charge that the building is costing more than double its original projection.
But GSA officials contend that it is being built at the first official estimate. They offer federal budget documents from 1990, showing the building was expected to cost $738 million.
Whatever critics and supporters say, they agree the facility is not typical of government-issue office space.
Architect James Freed, of Pei, Cobb, Freed and Partners in New York City, has described the building’s exterior as a “contemporary reading of the neoclassical style.” The structure is dressed up with 42,000 slabs of paneled limestone from the same Indiana quarry as other federal buildings in the area.
Inside is 125-foot atrium covered by 1,240 pieces of glass. Throughout the public areas, modern light fixtures form triangles, a symbol also etched into the shiny stainless elevator doors to underscore its Federal Triangle address.
But critics remain unimpressed.
Mike Reagan finds extra injury that the EPA is the largest government occupant, saying it is among the worst of the regulatory agencies scorned by his father.
He wonders aloud what his father would say about the EPA occupying the building. Then he agreed: Ronald Reagan would revive the famous line from the 1980 presidential debate: “There you go again.”
