Delays for BRAC not necessary

When the U.S. House of Repre­sentatives voted a few days ago to severely limit parking at the Defense Department’s new office com­plex off I-95 in Alexandria, it signaled what could be a delay of a year or more of part of the massive redeployment of thousands of welcomed military jobs to points south in Prince William and Fairfax counties.

It’s a delay we cannot endorse. Simply put, this latest stall tactic affecting the Base Realignment and Closure move (BRAC) as largely unwarranted and un­necessary.

The relevant BRAC legislation in ques­tion on Capitol Hill includes a provi­sion allowing the Secretary of Defense to delay all seven BRAC relocations for up to a year, even though by law the job migrations were to be completed in September. Among those sites are Quantico in Prince William County and Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County.

The specific location in Alexandria directly affected by the parking curtail­ment is the Mark Center, situated in the busy Interstate 95/Seminary Road area — a commuter corridor traveled daily by thousands of Prince William resi­dents. Certainly, the last thing Northern Virginia needs is increased vehicular traffic along already-stressed commuter routes. But some major assumptions regarding traffic woes prompted by an additional 6,400 workers at the Mark Center, as well as at the Fort Belvoir and Quantico sites, are highly flawed.

For example, one key assumption holds that a majority of federal work­ers filling these relocated jobs will add dramatically to southbound traffic pat­terns from the north in the morning. In fact, DOD studies find that many (and possibly most) of these newly patterned commuters will actually be traveling to Fort Belvoir and Mark Center from the

south and west — not from the concen­trated north. And although that might portend some added northbound traffic in the morning, it should lessen noticeably at both the northbound Newington/Fort Belvoir and Seminary Road exits off I-95.

Planners have already had five years to carry out a workable BRAC plan of action, and delaying the long-anticipat­ed move to Mark Center and possibly other BRAC sites for at least a year (and Rep. James P. Moran Jr. has already said one year may not be enough) is ill-ad­vised. As planners continue working on alternative transport systems — such as RideShare, shuttles, van polls, alternate scheduling, telecommuting, etc. — we believe the nightmare scenario that de­lay proponents are painting are overly dramatic and based, in part, on false assumptions.

Also, there may be some initially un­foreseen problems that cannot be fully realized and duly corrected until BRAC actually gets underway. Therefore, we believe it’s better to proceed with the BRAC transition at Mark Center and elsewhere without unnecessary delay and focus all available resources on reacting as quickly as possible to any trouble spots that might initially crop up.