A commission, made up of individuals appointed by President Trump, approved the proposal while acknowledging many of the public comments were against it.
WASHINGTON โ The final design for the ballroom set to replace the White House’s East Wing was approved by the Commission of Fine Arts Thursday morning, despite receiving more than 2,000 public comments that were overwhelmingly against it.
The meeting was supposed to be on the design, with a final vote expected at next monthโs session. But the chairman, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., made a motion to also vote on final approval, and six of the seven commissioners who were all installed by the Republican president since the start of the year voted in favor twice. One commissioner, James McCrery, did not vote because he was the initial architect on the project.
“In more than two decades of case work here for me, I’ve never seen as much public engagement,” said Thomas Luebke, Secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. “… The interest has been wide, from all over the United States, the majority of the United States, all regions, urban areas, rural areas, all over. They demonstrate a national concern carrying across political, geographic, demographic boundaries.”
In layman’s terms: “The vast, vast majority is negative in general,” Luebke said.
Luebke said 99% of the public comments were in opposition to the project. Many were about the illegal demolition of the East Wing, the huge ballroom dwarfing the White House, violations of historic preservation principles, lack of transparency in funding, and a miscarriage of democratic principles, Luebke said in summary.
Though the commission received so much public comment, he only read three comments. The first comment read was, however, positive, Luebke said in an attempt bracket all the responses.
“The United States is on the world stage. How we present ourselves says how we are viewed. Other countries have massive and elegant meeting rooms for dinners and formal events. We have a tent, or the small dining room at the upper level of the state department,” the person wrote. “Modernization to have America be competitive in the eyes of world leaders is not a bad thing.”
But that was an example of just a handful of supportive comments out of the more than 2,000 collected, Luebke said. The second comment he read, he said, was exemplary of the negative comments.
“This ill-conceived addition, which has already led to the hasty demolition of the historic East Wing, represents an affront to our heritage, a circumvention of democratic processes, and a misallocation of resources that could better serve the republic. It must be halted, lest we permit hubris to overshadow humility in the heart of our nation’s capital,” this person wrote.
The panel of commissioners, all appointed by President Trump, disagreed with the public comments and went ahead and approved it not just as a concept design but as a final design Thursday.ย
Chamberlain Harris, a 26-year-old former receptionist for Trump, said the proposed plan actually isn’t that big by ballroom standards.
“Responding to some of the public comment, … this is sort of like the greatest country in the world. It’s the greatest house in the world, and we want it to be sort of the greatest ballroom in the world,” Harris said.
Chairman Rodney Mims Cook Jr. said that Americans have short memories and that not long ago, previous presidents made changes to the White House as well.
The East Wing was demolished in October in preparation for the ballroom project, without congressional approval or any of the other steps usually taken when any changes are made to the White House campus.
