What A Day!

I have had some interesting experiences in the legislature over the last seven years but nothing comes close to what we all went through yesterday. I left my hotel room thinking “man it is going to be a wet and miserable day.” It was just raining a whole lot harder than it normally does. I got to the state house and parked in my spot on the upper deck and I am saying several thank you prayers now that I lobbied hard to get this parking spot several years ago. Special note— to all of you members of the House who gave me grief about trying to get a better parking spot, I drove home in my nice dry car last night.

After getting inside the state house everyone started coming to my office (which can fill up to maximum occupancy with three people) and looking out my windows. The rain came so hard and so fast that the cars were literally moving around. The drainage system could not handle all of the water coming down. 6 inches within an hour. Then it started to dawn on all of those who parked in the bottom deck that this was going to be bad but by that time the deck had flooded and the only thing left to do was go retrieve their belongings out of their cars. There was no way to move them and a whole lot of people saw their cars totaled.

Once we got to the House floor we had trouble getting a quorum because so many people were trying to save stuff in their cars. By this time the water had started to fall into the bottom two floors of the State House which got into the electrical system causing us to have to turn off the power in the building. When it became apparent that we would not be able to meet in the building for several more days due to structural safety and electrical problems the decision was made to reconvene in the old legislative chambers. At first I thought this was going to be a zoo but then again when isn’t the legislature a zoo!

A couple of interesting observations from working the old capitol. First, it was never designed to handle that many people at one time and when it was built it certainly never took comfort into consideration. The air did not work so we had to raise the windows and bring fans in. Also, there is no audio system there so it was very difficult to hear what people were saying at times. The Senate actually functioned pretty close to normal but the chamber they worked it was about half the size of their regular quarters and was very dark. The biggest change of the day was the fact that the House could not vote by machine so we had roll call votes AND you had to be there to vote. This proved to be funny some times because there was “voting someone else’s machine” if you didn’t answer Aye or No then you did not get to vote. This led to a bit of skewing in vote tallies because many more Republicans stayed in the chamber to vote than Democrats. Once Republicans beat the General Fund Budget back a couple of times Democrats finally rounded up enough of their members into the chamber and they finally prevailed on the General Budget vote.

I will say this- it did make it a whole lot easier to go back and forth to the Senate since we were right across the hall from each other instead of being on different floors. This turned out great for me because I had the Notoriety bill and the Autism Regional Centers bill up at almost the same time in two different chambers. So I ran back and forth all day. Thank goodness the Rule of the House requiring coats be warn at all times was suspended!

I was excited to say though that I was still able to Facebook from the floor of the House. I bet when they drew up the articles to secede from the Union in that chamber they never dreamed we would Facebooking and Twittering from our Blackberry’s while making laws in there.

At the end of the day it was hot and very wet but we actually had a productive legislative day in both chambers. Next week we go in on Thursday in a very moldy state house again.