A site that’s now home to government warehouses will be studied as a possible location to accommodate part of the titanic military job shift coming to Fort Belvoir, despite a warning by the Army that the plan doesn’t make sense.
Under a defense bill awaiting the president’s signature, the U.S. General Services Administration’s 70-acre property near Springfield would be considered as a possible home to some of the workers. The study is part of a massive planning effort to prepare the region for the arrival of about 22,000 new jobs to Belvoir, mandated by 2011 under federal Base Closure and Realignment directives.
Proponents of examining the GSA site, who include Northern Virginia congressmen, point to its proximity to public transit and the potential to disperse the workers over a larger area. The Army favors moving about 18,000 of the jobs to the nearby 800-acre Engineer Proving Ground, or EPG, a plan that drew harsh criticism from local leaders who feared a traffic nightmare.
The warehouse site, U.S. Rep. Tom Davis told The Examiner on Tuesday, “has the potential to include a minimum of 7,000 people that would be over at EPG” and would move them to an area served by Metro.
“That is huge if that can happen,” he said. “It cuts by a third the traffic flowing into the EPG.”
But the plan faces major hurdles, especially because the property, unlike the rest of the land being considered for the BRAC shift, is not owned by the Army. The concern was highlighted by Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin at a field hearing in August.
“This property is fully occupied and utilized by the GSA and its tenants,” said Eastin, according to a copy of his remarks. “After contacting GSA, we determined that the cost to acquire the property and relocate tenants along with the significant time involved made this option prohibitive.”
The idea is just one of many that run counter to the Army’s current intentions for the future of Fort Belvoir. The military will now be forced to re-examine a concept it had abandoned in early planning stages.
