Two Fairfax County supervisors sat down with Assistant Secretary of the Army Keith Eastin in his Pentagon office about two weeks ago, hoping to convince the military to put thousands of jobs on a favored property in Springfield, and not competing sites in Alexandria.
What they heard, said Lee District Supervisor Jeff McKay, did little to lift their hopes of bringing the 6,400 Washington Headquarters Services jobs to the sleepy plot of federal warehouses.
The employees are the last remaining chunk of the 19,000 jobs headed to Fort Belvoir by 2011 under Base Realignment and Closure. The Army’s biggest priority, Eastin reportedly told the supervisors, is finding a site that can be up and running by that deadline.
For McKay, that statement was an indication that the Army is steering away from the property in favor of one of two privately owned parcels in Alexandria, which are also vying for the jobs and could accommodate the workers much faster.
“What we’re set up here is for the Army to make the quick, easy and flat-out wrong decision,” McKay said.
McKay, Springfield Supervisor Pat Herrity, who joined him at the meeting, and other civic activists point to the site’s proximity to Metro and commuter rail, as well as the move’s potential to help pull Springfield out of its economic purgatory. The Mount Vernon chapter of the Sierra Club last week endorsed the use of the parcel for the BRAC jobs.
But with an immutable September 2011 date looming to complete the federally mandated military job shift, each passing day diminishes the Springfield plot’s chances. The site is now owned by the General Services Administration, which would need to bulldoze its warehouses and find another home. The two competitors – the Mark Center on Seminary Road and Victory Center on Eisenhower Avenue – don’t face the same challenge. Under any arrangement, the final site would need to become part of Fort Belvoir.
The Army plans to eliminate one of the Alexandria sites by Sept. 15, and make a final pick by the end of the month, according to Army spokesman Dave Foster. He declined to comment on the details of the conversation among McKay, Herrity and Eastin.
Foster cautioned that the Army won’t necessarily immediately announce its decision.
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