The Department of Defense has agreed to delay a deadline for leased military facilities to meet a series of anti-terrorism building standards, Rep. Jim Moran announced Tuesday, allowing defense agencies across Northern Virginia to renew their leases.
The decision is significant because of the robust military presence in leased space throughout the region, especially in Arlington County. Its effect on a federally mandated shift of about 20,000 military personnel by September 2011 is a matter of dispute, however.
Property owners had been faced with accommodating a host of protection measures — including deep setbacks from the road and no underground parking — that would have shored up the facilities against a potential terrorist attack.
If those changes, which Moran called “an impossible imposition,” weren’t in place by the end of the month, agencies would not have been able to renew their leases. Under the new policy the congressman had pushed for, those agencies have until 2011 to renew their leases, which can run through 2014.
The extension clouds the issue of a parallel government mandate: Base Realignment and Closure, a 2005 order that essentially would drain Crystal City of its military jobs and vastly expand Fairfax County’s Fort Belvoir.
Moran framed the ruling as “at least some partial undoing of that unreasonable decision,” and said he expected the agencies slated to move to instead stay put and sign long-term leases.
The military disagreed. Said Department of Defense spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin: “This action has no effect on the requirement for BRAC moves to occur by September 2011.
“It has no effect on BRAC implementation whatsoever,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Moran has been a longtime opponent of BRAC, protesting that it would shuffle defense workers from transit-accessible offices in the inner suburbs to an already traffic-clogged Fort Belvoir, causing enormous bottlenecks.
The Defense Department’s reprieve on anti-terrorism standards does, to some extent, undercut a key original justification for BRAC — to remove sensitive agencies from unprotected leased space.
