Bringing 22,000 new workers to Fort Belvoir by September 2011 will be impossible under the military’s existing plans, Northern Virginia U.S. Rep. Tom Davis said Friday in another sign of growing pessimism over the federally mandated job shift.
“It’s undoable under the current timeline, the current framework and the current density,” the 11th District Republican told The Examiner.
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Congress ordered the move in 2005 as part of Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, adding a work force nearly equal to the 24,000 daily employees at the Pentagon to the southern Fairfax County base.
Even if two major proposals aimed at alleviating BRAC’s local burden to traffic and government services pass Congress, Davis said meeting the timeline for the shift is still “optimistic.” Both provisions are tied to the fiscal 2008 Defense Authorization bill the Senate is expected to take up this week.
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., included an amendment in the House’s version of the bill that would stall 9,000 of the employees moving to the base from leased space in Arlington County until more than $400 million of needed road improvement are put in place.
Davis and Moran jointly included a separate amendment that would open up the nearby 70-acre General Services Administration site on Loisdale Road to potentially thousands of the new workers. The site would become part of Fort Belvoir under the bill.
The use of the GSA site would create a wider footprint for BRAC and spread out some of the expected traffic mess associated with the military’s preferred plan, which clusters 18,000 of the 22,000 jobs on the 800-acre Engineer Proving Ground off Interstate 95.
But provisions in the mammoth defense act that would seek a reduction of American troops in Iraq threaten to draw out the debate over its passage, as some legislators seek to again tie war funding to a mandated withdrawal.
Also in question is whether opponents of altering the strict BRAC timeline, who include Sen. John Warner, R-Va., will seek to halt Moran’s delay of 9,000 of the workers to Belvoir. Warner spokesman John Ullyot wrote by e-mail last month the senator would “examine Congressman Moran’s amendment in detail, and talk with him about its intent and consequences.”
