The U.S. Army has chosen two Alexandria sites as final contenders to house 6,200 military jobs that originally were slated to move to Fort Belvoir.
The 19-acre Mark Center, bordered by Interstate 395, Beauregard Street and Seminary Road, and the Victory Center on Eisenhower Avenue will compete to be the final private site under consideration.
The Army is expected to choose one by the end of this month, according to Fort Belvoir spokesman Don Carr.
The Army then will decide whether to move the jobs to one of those Alexandria locations or to a government-owned warehouse center in Springfield. A final decision is expected by June.
“The Victory Center is now getting a more careful look by the [Department of Defense] security staff, and they have concerns about the site,” Fairfax County Base Realignment and Closure liaison Mark Canale said in a January memo to the county’s Board of Supervisors.
“Mark Center’s weakness is its limited access to public transportation/Metro Station, but it is claiming its proximity to [high-occupancy vehicle] and [high-occupancy toll] lanes,” he said.
Both Victory Center developer Jones Lang LaSalle and Mark Center developer Duke Realty Corp. were required to return an Army questionnaire about transportation, security and environmental issues by Feb. 7.
The developers would have to sell the land to the Army for the deal to go through.
The Army considers the General Services Administration‘s Springfield warehouse site attractive because the federal government already owns it and it is close to the Franconia-Springfield Metrorail stop, Carr said.
If the Springfield site were selected, however, the GSA would have to relocate the federal agencies that are housed there.
The 6,200 jobs in question were planned to move to Fort Belvoir, with 13,000 others, under the Pentagon‘s BRAC plan.
Those plans were altered when a 2005 Urban Land Institute study showed the area was not prepared to handle the increased traffic.
The Army had been considering proposals from seven private developers for sites as far away from Fort Belvoir as Dumfries, Manassas and Quantico, but eliminated five of those in late December, saying they did not meet the necessary guidelines.
