Diverting thousands of military jobs to a General Services Administration warehouse site instead of to Fort Belvoir would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require years of work, an Army study has found.
Some local officials want to shift some of the 22,000 workers moving to the base by 2011 to the 70-acre site on Loisdale Court in Springfield. The warehouse is only a half-mile from the Franconia-Springfield Metro station and now serves as storage space for the GSA.
The congressionally mandated study says the move is feasible, but predicts substantial costs and delays. Even the most modest scenario, in which 3,000 employees would relocate to the site, would require four and a half years of preparation and cost $298 million, or $415 million with warehouse replacement, according to the study. Moving 9,000 jobs to the site would cost as much as $1.19 billion and take six and a half years.
All those costs would come on top of the massive price of upgrading the region’s transportation network to support the added traffic. The Army, in a separate study released last month, estimated those upgrades would cost $458 million. Local officials have blasted that figure as massive underestimation.
Mount Vernon District Supervisor Gerald Hyland, whose district encompasses Fort Belvoir, was encouraged that the study found the move feasible.
“I think that is a plus,” Hyland said. “And I would hope that we would seriously consider trying to make that happen.”
Under the Army’s current plan, as many as 18,000 of the jobs would move to the 800-acre Engineer Proving Ground, with the rest moving to the main post. Army officials previously said shifting some of those workers to the GSA site is not realistic, because of the strict constraints of BRAC’s timeline and the fact that the Army does not own the land.
“Fort Belvoir has no authority to use the GSA site,” Belvoir spokesman Don Carr said. “We can’t plan use of real estate that isn’t ours.”
