For decades, Senators debated the budget at untelevised hearings. Now, they'll be streamed

PROVIDENCE — The furniture is gone. The ceiling tiles are coming down, along with decades of paint. And the construction has begun to let a little more sun shine down on Rhode Island lawmakers.

After a delayed start, the work is underway to equip three more rooms at the Rhode Island State House with remote-controlled cameras − trained on tiered rows of lawmakers − so the public can, for the first time, watch live previously untelevised hearings on proposed new tax, spending and health-care laws.

For decades, the Senate Finance Committee has debated what is now a $13-billion state budget out of view of anyone except those actually in the room, in the limited number of seats available for members of the public.

Barring unforeseen developments, Henry Kinch, the director of the legislature's business office, anticipates three more House and Senate committee rooms − for a total of eight − will be equipped for televised legislative hearings − at a cost of $1,885,000 by the time the legislature goes into full swing, in about "six to eight weeks."

"The State House is majestic and historic. But it was constructed around the time the radio was invented, decades before the advent of television. This renovation will maintain the historic character of the hearing rooms while equipping them with modern, wall-mounted, robotic cameras to broadcast the proceedings," Senate leaders said in a newsletter on Friday.

"We're reorganizing this so that we can have more transparency and access," Kinch said Thursday on an earlier tour of the construction sites. "The idea being that we are adding TV capabilities so that members of the public who might wish to [watch) ... but don't necessarily want to come up to the State House in the dark, with a lack of parking and so forth, can watch it on TV."

Handicapped accessibility a concern for the hearing rooms

The start was temporarily delayed by a concern raised by the Rhode Island Governor's Commission on Disabilities about how a legislator in a wheelchair would access the new tiered row seating in two of the redesigned Senate hearing rooms. While there is no Rhode Island legislator using a wheelchair currently, there has been in the past, including former state legislator-turned-Congressman James Langevin, who recently retired from the U.S. House of Representatives.

More on Langevin:A Rhode Islander is the only quadriplegic to have served in Congress. What it meant to him

Should the issue arise in the future with a legislator on one of the Senate committees in rooms with tiered seating, Kinch said the committee will be allowed to use what is now the House Education Committee room instead, which is large enough for remote broadcasts without tiered seating.

For the record: Senate leaders, pulled into the remote broadcast world by the COVID-prevention demands of the pandemic, are still resisting the posting of written public testimony on the legislative website, which the House has been doing since 2021.

The skinny on the Capitol TV expansion project:

The General Assembly gave a $100,000 architectural design contract to Vision 3 Associates to draw up the renovations plans for the 2nd-floor hearing rooms used for years by the Senate Finance and Corporations Committees, and the first-floor hearing room used most recently by the House Education Committee.

E.F. O'Donnell & Sons Co. are the general contractors and Dome Construction, Kelly Floor Covering, C & K Electric, Synet Inc. and Nexgen Mechanical are the subcontractor under separate contracts totaling $1.1 million.

The Assembly has also budgeted $685,000 for the remote-control cameras and the equipment in the new control room being fashioned out of recently vacated space in the basement.

Live streaming of some Senate and House hearings first began in 2013, and recordings of all streamed hearings are archived on the General Assembly website for "on demand" viewing at any time. Every hearing that is streamed is also televised on Capitol TV.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI General Assembly hearings will be live streamed after renovations