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Running around at the Capitol

Delivering messages. And coffee. And sodas. All week long. When it was all over, he didn't want it to end.

By TIMES STAFF WRITER
Published May 7, 2006

Carson Brock, a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Pasco Middle School in Dade City, served last week as a page in the Florida House of Representatives. State Rep. Ken Littlefield, R-Wesley Chapel, sponsored Carson in the program, which exposes kids ages 12-14 to the workings of the Legislature. Carson kept a daily journal of his experience during the week:

My day began as the unwilling victim of a short haircut. The appendectomy I had last weekend threw my timing off to get one at home, so my parents had to rush me out the door and beg and plead before a Tallahassee shop had even opened to get me the cut.

I threw on my coat and tie (complete with official patch) and rushed down to the Capitol to begin my day as a House page.

I learned that a page is a glorified messenger. I brought coffee, soda and messages to a lot of representatives. Most messages just asked for a meeting outside. The others I couldn't read. They were delivered to seats on a coordinate plane, like row 2, seat 4. I am glad my math teacher taught that. Thank you, Mrs. Fletcher.

We get three breaks and one lunch break. The cafeteria was delicious - chicken tenders and fries. One of the first things I noticed is that the House runs on coffee and soda - all caffeine. Some members were pretty particular. I hear one guy likes 17 shakes of pepper in his V8 juice! I definitely wouldn't mind giving the orders here.

When the session began, I felt like it would swallow me whole. There was so much activity with the representatives running around, and saying "No!" and "Yea!" that it felt like a New York City street. There were a lot of thumbs up. I like the voting when they just had to punch the button. That's more my type.

The building was like a skyscraper. Inside, there was a lot of marble and stone. After everything started, I began to relax, and things got smoother. A lady explained what to do in case there was a fire alarm or bomb threat - follow the man in the orange vest. She seemed kind of frustrated to be having to talk to the pages. My thought was just find the anonymous man in the orange vest to evacuate.

Finally, at the end of the day a speaker went for 10 minutes. We were happy when he was done. Because of the long speech there was a huge rush of messages to be delivered at the end - I delivered five at one time. And then I was home free.

Walking back to the hotel I remembered the bonus - Billy Donovan and two Gator basketball players were honored this morning. It's a pretty exciting time.

Two big things happened today: I was lucky enough to meet the governor, and I had enough sense to not laugh when I met the guy who likes all the pepper in his V-8.

I started out my day at 8:30 a.m. passing out Senate and House calendars. House members are really particular about neatness on their desk, at the beginning of the day anyway. They have to have both calendars placed neatly on the right side of their desk, so neat that our director sent a checker behind us to make sure they were right.

Now at the end of the day, that's a different story. You see papers strewn all over the desk, a few coffee cups here and there and a whole bunch of yellow slips. The yellow slips are those messages that we deliver all day.

I ate my lunch down at the cafeteria on floor LL. A buddy I met from Tallahassee ate with me - sandwich and chips. Then we went to the 22nd Floor with our extra large drinks. You can see just about anything from there, the whole city of Tallahassee.

When I got back from lunch I had about 45 minutes until I met the governor. Thank you, Rep. Littlefield. My family and I met him in his office where just about everything was red and white and one table had a bunch of eagles. My mom did most of the talking and asked about the Barbara Bush pinch. My mom has adopted it - sneaking up on people and pinching them in the side so they don't know where it came from. The governor brought a bobble head doll out of his mother and we all had a good laugh. It was really an honor to actually have a conversation with him and to talk about my brothers and sister - Coleman, Connor Mack and Ashton. He is really tall, and I bet he was a real tall kid in school.

Most everything the House deals with is cause and effect. For example, the hurricanes caused lots of damage, which affects the insurance for houses. Now the House has to deal with insurance bills. Mr. Holcomb, my geography teacher, is a big fan of cause and effect.

Rep. Littlefield has a front-row seat. It's a great spot right in front of the speaker of the House. He likes to stand and turn around and listen to everyone talking. He has a very deep voice.

Today there was a lot of just sitting around waiting to deliver messages. It's hard not to get antsy. The bench where we sit in the back can get hard.

But sometimes the House sounds like an auction. They talk so fast when reading bills and amendments. When the representatives get too loud, the House speaker bangs his big gavel. Everybody gets really quiet for a minute but then it gets pretty loud again. All of the members are talking to each other to plan what is going to happen and what they are going to say - I think.

One time, one of the representatives was pretty fired up and was talking back to the speaker. The speaker banged his gavel and didn't allow him to keep talking. In our family we call that getting "Cokerized." That's when you're doing something you know you're not supposed to do. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Coker, would put a quick stop to that!

One thing I noticed is that everybody gets really heated when they are talking about tax increases. It's one of the times when the House is the loudest. Nobody wants more taxes, and they don't want to have to make them higher. Rep. Littlefield wants to give the people from home the choice about some taxes instead of the House deciding for them. He called that first-degree democracy.

Tallahassee to me seems like a great place. Where we are staying doesn't have too many restaurants. It seems like a place where a lot of people come for business trips. You see a lot of coats and ties. When I think of Tallahassee, I think of a big city with a lot of skyscrapers. It's really not. It's a city with an old feel - a lot of brick buildings and streets.

When I first got to the House, I was asked to pass out a few papers for representatives. When we were getting ready for the Pledge of Allegiance, I lent my jacket to somebody who didn't have one so they could lead the pledge. as the morning progressed things got busier and I heard from a friend who went over and watched during his break that the Senate was in a dog fight about school class size.

The FCAT came up again. It seemed to me that the representatives were debating how it helped and how it didn't help kids who were being tested. Most representatives voted for the bill, but there were a few in the mix who voted against it. After the bill passed, a representative brought out a football and said he had carried the ball down the field and scored a touchdown. He passed the football to a different representative who threw it to the speaker, who brought it down to take a picture.

The phone bill debate got pretty heated. There is a fight about cable companies and who will get service. This bill took one of the longer time periods to not pass. It was voted down.

When you think of a mother with a group of kids on a field trip to the Capitol and one is lost, what do you see? A mother frantic with worry trying to keep the other kids calm. That's what I saw when they got on an elevator with me. The mother had lost a child and was trying to get to the lobby as quickly as possible. I saw them later, and the child had been found.

It was great to have been in the House. I wish I could have stayed longer! It's kind of hard to leave friends I got to know over a week and leave a place I got to know and worked in after having a great time. The House is like the soccer season, where you can have up times and down, but once you find your groove you go along well.

The business of the House went up and then down, but today it seemed to find a middle place. Today, within five minutes of when I got there, the yellow buttons were lighting up, and I was up and going. Those buttons seemed to stay on all morning. It was crunch time, the last day of the session and they needed to get everything done. The breaks were different today, too. My lunch at 12:30 lasted until 4 in the afternoon because the House went on a recess that was supposed to be two hours, and it turned into three.

One of the farewell speeches was actually on the funny side. One representative taped the mouth of another for being too talkative that day. He is kind of the prankster of the House. On Tuesday or Wednesday he had asked my buddy and me just about every hour to take some cranberry juice to one of the older representatives and say that his grandchildren said he should stay on a juice fix. Every time we would deliver it he would just laugh, but we would still give it to him. He drank most of them, and I think at the end of the day there were maybe two left.

Another funny thing was an alternate speaker who looked similar to regular House speaker Allan Bense, only he was shorter and wore glasses. (It was actually state Rep. David Russell, R-Brooksville.) Speaker Bense left and a minute later put up a sign that said "Mini Me." The first time the alternate speaker banged, or I should say tapped, the gavel, the representatives all started moaning and saying, "Come on, give me something better than that." So he banged the gavel as hard as he could. I thought that was pretty funny.

They handled the budget business today. Most of the discussion I couldn't really hear. When I left this afternoon, the House was still going. I wish I could still be there now, and I hope I can go back next year.

The thing I will remember most is getting to the House the first time and meeting the other guys. I tried to meet the guys so I would have somebody to go to lunch with. Eating and then going up to the 22nd floor and looking out was really fun. Meeting the governor and getting to know Rep. Littlefield was also great. The representatives were all different. Some were very talkative, some were funny playing jokes and stuff, and others were more serious. I will always remember this week and definitely the guy who put pepper in his V8.

[Last modified May 7, 2006, 01:10:18]