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State Rep. Vicki Berger, R-Salem, said she is concerned that by the time a proposal for $225 million in seismic upgrades at the state capitol makes its way through the bureaucratic process, the building could be a pile of rocks.

A proposal to shore up the capitol is somewhere in political and bureaucratic limbo, she said.

“People forget that we darn near lost the capitol in the Scotts Mills earthquake of (1993),” Berger said. “We’ve known for years it’s a building ready to collapse in a medium to high shaker.”

Berger, co-chairwoman of the House Revenue Committee, began pushing for seismic upgrades before the legislative session. Little has been said about it since, she said.

“It really is a matter of political will,” Berger said.

Suggesting that people spend $225 million to shore up the seat of state government may not play well with voters who often see elected officials and bureaucrats as self-interested fat cats, she added.

“People ask why we can’t spend the money on schools,” Berger said. “Well, the fact is we have a building that could well come tumbling down.”

The fate of seismic upgrades rests largely in the hands of the Joint Ways and Means Committee. Members passed the capitol upgrade off to the Oregon Military Department for study and recommendation, said Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, a committee co-chairwoman. Military department officials have since passed the issue to the Infrastructure Finance Authority of the Oregon Business Development Department (known colloquially as Business Oregon).

“Business Oregon can – and has – initiated projects on its own,” Johnson said. “We decided they were the appropriate agency to handle this issue.”

As Business Oregon and Infrastructure Finance Authority come up with recommendations, seismic upgrades are not likely to show up on the Ways and Means Committee’s agenda. The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn next month, so the odds are stacked against any legislative action this session.

Berger said she hopes the tectonic plates get the memo and resist the urge to destroy the capitol until state officials decide to do something.

Ideally, she said, she would at least like agency officials or legislators to ante up a couple of million dollars and bring in engineers to check out the extent of the problem.

“We’re politely saying, ‘Let’s do the next step,” Berger said. “What we’d like to see funded this session is not the whole package. What we’d like to see is engineers under there to see what it would really cost. Until you’ve dug under the soil and seen what we’re dealing with, costs are only a guess.”

Oregon’s first capitol burned down in 1855. The Legislature approved $100,000 to replace it in 1872. (That would be about $1.9 million in 2013 dollars.) The second capitol lasted only 64 years until it burned down in 1936. Legislators approved $25 million (or $45 million in 2013 dollars) to construct the current building.

Berger said she realizes she is talking about potentially spending five times that amount for seismic upgrades. That doesn’t include the cost of the Oregon State Capitol Master Plan and its goal of adding new wings to the capitol building.

“Yeah, people say you could be an office building for legislators more cheaply,” she said. “Gee, that doesn’t make sense. What would you do with the current building? Tear it down? You can’t have an unstable building. You couldn’t use it as museum. You couldn’t bring tourists into a building that could come down on them.”

There is another problem, she added.

“What are you going to do with the Legislature for two to four years while you build another building?” she said. “You can’t stay in this building. It is a destabilized building. Sooner or later, we have to deal with it.”

The $225 million estimate came from a report just issued by the Legislative Revenue Office.

Legislative Revenue Officer Paul Warner stressed that he is not saying whether the capitol needs seismic upgrades or whether lawmakers should spend $225 million to make them.

“We basically just did an economic impact analysis to determine the cost of such a project,” he said.

He initially crunched the numbers in 2009, but has since adjusted them, allowing for 2 percent inflation to come up with the estimated price. His analysis makes the assumption that work would begin in 2015.

According to the report, the biggest need is what is known as “base isolation” – basically a system of structural elements that allows a building’s superstructure to shake independent of its substructure. In other words, a quake can rattle the substructure without the superstructure being damaged as well.

Meanwhile, other state officials also are clamoring for construction money.

Based on the Oregon Corrections Population Forecast issued in November, Corrections Department Director Colette Peters wants the state to spend $600 million on new prison space over the next 10 years.

Like the $225 million it may cost to upgrade the capitol, that dollar amount caused a lot of jaws to drop, Berger said.

“This is all a debt management issue,” she said. “We are pretty reasonable within our debt because we’re very careful.”

Nonetheless, she added, important capital projects still manage to be pursued and completed.

“We did manage to upgrade the state hospital in Salem, which we absolutely had to do, and it turned out well,” she said.