Rep. Jim Moran says he feels like he is watching an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
With a deadline for moving 19,000 military jobs to Fort Belvoir just two years away, and only a pittance of the needed $458 million in road improvements funded, the veteran Democrat lawmaker is predicting a traffic crisis on a far greater scale than southern Fairfax County’s existing bottlenecks.
“Anybody that drives in that area at rush hour can see that it’s already at full capacity … when you add another 19,000 people, most of them driving alone, it’s impossible for them to move,” he told The Examiner on Wednesday. “That will just be a long parking lot.”
The new workers are set to finish arriving by September 2011 as part of nationwide reorganization of military facilities mandated by Congress four years ago, a process called Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC.
Once a top regional issue, BRAC has been pushed out of the spotlight by the recession and Virginia’s upcoming gubernatorial election. But the need for road improvements hasn’t changed, said Moran, who is requesting a meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The best solution, he said, would be to leave many of the incoming workers where they were — in transit-accessible leased space like in Crystal City. Failing that, he wants a greater infusion of federal money for road upgrades.
Had members of Congress been allowed to earmark the federal stimulus package, Moran said he would have allocated the full $458 million. The stimulus does fund $60 million to complete a long-awaited completion of the Fairfax County Parkway through the base’s Engineer Proving Ground.
Requests for greater local road funding to the federal government aren’t new, but having a different presidential administration than the one that carried out the 2005 base realignment offers Moran a modicum of hope for change. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw the BRAC recommendations, was “closed-minded,” Moran said. “Had it been Gates, he never would have made this decision to move everyone to Fort Belvoir and take them away from the Pentagon and out of public transit and into individual automobiles,” he said.
