The Army says it will not place 6,400 workers at a highly favored plot of federal warehouses in Springfield unless it can find a way to pay for nearby road improvements, leaving local officials to further doubt the military’s willingness to use the 70-acre site.
Proponents of using the parcel, now occupied by the General Services Administration, argue it is best suited to house a large part of the 19,000 jobs headed to Fort Belvoir in the next few years as part of Base Realignment and Closure, due largely to its proximity to mass transit.
An Army report released this week, however, pinned new transportation caveats to the move, which Fairfax County Supervisor Jeff McKay points to as more evidence the Army will try to reject the GSA site.
Local officials pushing for the parcel have wrangled for months with the federal government, which appears reluctant to vacate the property and demolish the warehouses on it.
“They’re doing everything they can to avoid doing the hard thing, and the hard thing here is using that site,” McKay said.
The final destination of the workers — almost all of them part of the Washington Headquarters Services — will be one of three locales: the GSA site, the 16-acre “Victory Center” or the 24-acre “Mark Center.” The latter two are privately owned and are in Alexandria.
The report, which evaluates the environmental impact of all three options, said the Army would need to certify local arteries as critical “defense access roads,” which could be funded by the military, or, failing that, seek congressional appropriations. Both funding sources so far have proven relatively scarce for Fort Belvoir.
“Without approval of the foregoing, the Army would not proceed with the GSA site alternative,” the report said.
The report does not spell out the same caveats for the other two sites, which it calls “available and more suitable from a transportation perspective.”
The remainder of the 19,000 jobs headed for Belvoir by 2011 are split between the main base and a nearby 800-acre former proving ground.
