A Fairfax County supervisor who has long sought to raze a federal warehouse site in Springfield is challenging a recent Army study that casts doubt on the plan.
Making better use of the 70-acre General Services Administration site on Loisdale Court has been on Lee District Supervisor Dana Kauffman’s agenda for a decade. In recent months, Kauffman has supported a local push to get the U.S. military to reroute some of the 22,000 new workers destined for Fort Belvoir as part of the Base Closure and Realignment plan onto the property, which is only half a mile from the Franconia-Springfield Metro Station.
County officials say the proposal could spread out the new traffic caused by the influx and help prevent an expected transportation disaster.
The Army’s congressionally mandated study determined that using the site in the BRAC plan was feasible, but also expensive and time-consuming. The most modest scenario — in which 3,000 jobs would end up on the GSA site — could cost nearly $300 million and require four and a half years of preparation. A shift of 9,000 military workers to the site could cost almost four times that amount, according to the study.
Kauffman, who calls the GSA’s use of the parcel “just plain stupid, and a waste of taxpayer dollars,” said the Army failed to provide context to the price tag by not listing side by side how much its current plan would cost in the study.
He pointed to potentially expensive cleanup work still to come on Belvoir’s Engineer Proving Ground, where 18,000 of the workers are set to move by 2011.
“Right now it’s an interesting mass of numbers that is devoid of comparison,” he said.
The Examiner could not reach a GSA spokesman Thursday, and an Army spokesman did not respond by press time.
The Army has previously argued that it cannot make use of the GSA site for its BRAC plans because it does not own the land.
