Queen of Caligula Hillary Clinton has the highest rented office space in the senate. I'm sure she is very concerned about our national debt.
newsday.com
NEW YORK (AP) -- About the same time her husband was giving up a penthouse suite in favor of less fancy accommodations in Harlem, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was signing a $514,148-a-year lease on the most expensive hometown office of any U.S. senator.
The space is on the 26th floor of an East Side skyscraper.
Jim Kennedy, the spokesman for New York's newly elected senator, said Monday that much of the Clinton office space is taken up by a group of about 60 volunteers working on various constituent-related issues.
''This is labor-intensive, and that's about five times as many volunteers as the average Senate office has working on constituent case work,'' he said.
It will be the most expensive hometown office of any senator, according to the General Services Administration. The rent is $90,000 a year more than that paid by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and more than double the $209,532 paid by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., for offices one block away.
Kennedy said there is nothing unusual about Clinton's choice of space in the 50-story building. ''Every year, somebody in the Senate has to have the most expensive offices and, probably through history, given the price of real estate, it is somebody from New York,'' he said.
Controvery erupted last month over former President Clinton's plan to lease a penthouse suite for $800,000 a year, at taxpayer expense, in the posh Carnegie Towers on West 57th Street. Under attack from Congress and other critics for planning to spend more for office space than the other four living ex-presidents combined, Clinton opted instead for more modest space in a new Harlem office building.
Kennedy said Sen. Hillary Clinton had not followed suit ''because we believe that as a senator, her offices should be centrally located.''
Kennedy said Clinton actually is saving taxpayers a lot of money by moving into 780 Third Ave. rather than taking over the more glamorous Chrysler Building offices of her predecessor, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan was paying $280,000 a year, but that would have jumped to $627,000 under a new lease, he said.
He said the Clinton office suite is listed at 7,909 square feet, but part of that is taken up by elevator shafts and building mechanical equipment, reducing the actual usable space to 5,650 square feet.
Clinton is paying $91 a square foot for the usable space, Kennedy said, just under the limit of $91.14 per square foot set by the GSA.
The building, completed in 1984, is owned by the Teachers Insurance Annuity Association of America.
The suite has two conference rooms, various offices and cubicles and a kitchen. Clinton also has free access to business conference facilities in the building and a 150-set auditorium in the basement. |
