Louisiana Voice

When several state offices moved into the brand new Claiborne Building just a stone’s throw southeast of the towering State Capitol Building back in 2002, the Office of State Lands was designated for the basement, ostensibly because of the weight of its volumes of documents and records prohibited its being on an upper floor. Others say that former Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennan wanted the top floor for the Division of Administration. The citing of the weight of the volumes doesn’t carry much weight when one considers that much heavier volumes are housed on the second and third floors of the Louisiana State Library a couple of blocks to the south.

But it was located directly beneath the building’s cafeteria kitchen.

Turns out that was a typical, if fateful, bureaucratic decision.

A half-dozen buildings were constructed within a few blocks of the Capitol Building toward the end of former Gov. Mike Foster’s second term. The Claiborne Building was constructed almost directly atop a municipal sewage pumping station and that fact is never more evident than on hot summer days.

At times the stench is so strong one can almost see it—like heat shimmering off a hot asphalt highway.

Gov. Bobby Jindal briefly floated the idea of selling state buildings, including Claiborne, and leasing back state office space but that idea apparently didn’t pass the smell test and was quickly flushed.

Before the $54 million Claiborne Building was even completed, a heavy rain caused flooding in the basement where State Lands, the Office of Risk Management, a state printing office and a few Department of Education offices were to be located.

Even after tenants moved in, the water line from the flood was still visible on the walls.

Then, after tenants were settled in, another torrential storm blew rainwater horizontally and water poured into the basement area through, of all places, the buildings steps that front Third Street.

But on Monday, a brand new water invasion left employees of State Lands feeling pretty crappy: a sewage leak from above dumped raw sewage water through the State Land suspending ceiling tile, narrowing missing irreplaceable historical records, some of them dating back to the late 1700s.

The State Lands Office houses priceless, one-of-a-kind land title records and Monday’s incident was only the latest of about a dozen incidents in which water has leaked through its ceiling from the kitchen above.

This is the first time, however, that sewage has leaked into the office.

The Bureau of Land Management office in Washington, D.C., does have duplicates of State Land’s records and the records kept by State Lands have been scanned, but it is the originals that are state treasures and impossible to replace.

They are kept on hand because occasionally scanned documents do not pick up penciled in notations and workers have to refer to the actual documents.

Even though all the previous leaks, as well as the latest one, have missed dumping water directly onto the files, the misses have been extremely close, in some cases, only inches away.

On Monday, the precaution of spreading plastic sheeting over the file cabinets was taken.

“It’s just dumb luck,” said one employee, “that there have been no leaks occur at say, 7 p.m. on a Friday when everyone had gone home for the weekend.”