The District’s proposed forensics laboratory, a critical and long-awaited crime-fighting facility, will not be finished until at least 2011, two years later than a timeline released one year ago, the D.C. Council recently learned.
Construction of the $218 million Consolidated Forensics Laboratory is now slated to start in 2009, Office of Property Management Director Lars Etzkorn told the council’s public safety committee during a recent hearing. Last spring, former Mayor Anthony Williams’ administration anticipated ground breaking in 2007, but by December it was delayed until 2008.
“They came in and decided they were going to reinvent every decision, and that’s just a waste of time,” Council Member Phil Mendelson, public safety committee chairman, said of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s team. “The forensics lab has suffered for it.”
The 240,000-square-foot consolidated laboratory will feature a forensics and DNA lab, a public health “bioterrorism” lab, and the chief medical examiner’s office. The facility is key to reducing the District’s massive backlog of DNA evidence awaiting analysis at the FBI’s lab at Quantico.
The stall is due in large part to the two years required to move the Metropolitan Police Department’s First District headquarters from the forensics lab site, at Fourth and Schools streets Southwest, to its new home at 225 Virginia Ave. SW. The Virginia Avenue facility, which the city leased last year, must be redesigned and built.
“We are certainly looking at an end of 2008 deadline,” Etzkorn told the committee. “There is room in the program that would allow us to stay on track if it occurred even in the first quarter of 2009.”
The District is receiving six months rent free on Virginia Avenue under its lease agreement with the building’s owner. That was a deal “entered into by the previous administration,” Etzkorn said.
The redesign is more complex than first imagined and for a time the city will have to pay for space it does not occupy.
“We’re not pulling these dates out of thin air,” he said.
