Northern Virginia officials are calling for the delay of a massive military realignment to Fort Belvoir in order to prepare the area’s transportation networks for thousands of new commuters on southern Fairfax County roads.
With 22,000 military and civilian contractor jobs headed to Fort Belvoir, local policymakers say they want to see the Army postpone the strict 2011 deadline, at least for sending 18,000 of the workers to the Engineer Proving Ground. They include U.S. Reps. Jim Moran andTom Davis, as well as Fairfax County Supervisors Dana Kauffman and Gerald Hyland, who represent the two districts most affected by the move mandated under last year’s Base Realignment and Closure directives.
“We are not prepared at all to accommodate the traffic that this move … will require,” Moran said on Thursday at a congressional hearing in Springfield called by Davis, chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform.
Davis blasted the BRAC move as having “an unrealistic timeline and a flawed planning process.”
Officials drew a bleak picture of the current transportation network and outlined the urgency of finding funding for hundreds of millions in improvements.
“Five years is an impossibly short time [to prepare for the move],” Vivian Watts, a Virginia delegate and former state secretary of transportation, said on Thursday.
But Keith Eastin, an assistant secretary of the army and the lone military official speaking at the hearing, said the necessary tasks — while challenging — could be completed within the five-year time frame.
“While some might question the wisdom of [moving] so many people down there, this is a fact of life,” Eastin said.
