Special Report: Jim Moran and the Mark Center

4 Responses to Special Report: Jim Moran and the Mark Center

1. DW Smith | July 9, 2011 at 6:34 am | Reply

   The Marc Center is a bust! Pentagon waste at it’s best. Crystal City is set up for transportation. The Marc Center is to close to I-395 to be a secure area, it would serve better as Community College space that builds futures. After all
   the military is not big on building unless you first blow it to pieces.
   Take the 6400 staff members and put them in Crystal City space that was first vacated by the Navy only to be renovated 6 -7 years ago and set up for the Army. The Army is now moving to Ft. Belvoir, A nice secure area, to say the least. Now here in Crystal City is a large Mil Spec office area ready to go!
   Marc Center bad, Crystal City good even a Pentagon accountant can get it.

2. Anonymous | July 11, 2011 at 8:08 pm | Reply

   This is what the Congressman actually said when interviewed regarding the decision. The Congressman was quoted directly in the Washington Post and Connection papers saying that the Mark Center was the wrong decision.

   Va. Takes Stock of Army’s Decision
   Officials See Ways To Ease Job Site’s Effect on Traffic

   By Sandhya Somashekhar
   Washington Post Staff Writer
   Wednesday, October 1, 2008; B01

   Virginia officials said yesterday that the Army’s decision to put 6,400 defense workers in Alexandria was a blow to efforts to cluster development around mass transit, but they expressed hope that the impact on traffic could be minimized with stepped-up bus service and road improvements.

   The owner of the Mark Center, the private development on Seminary Road where the office complex will be built, said it will invest as much as $10 million to improve intersections and expand lanes in the area. The company, Duke Realty, also plans to create a transportation hub on the site, with local bus service and shuttle service to the King Street Metro, which has a Virginia Railway Express depot.

   The site will also benefit from the proposed widening of Interstate 395 to provide high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, state officials said.

   Still, officials expressed disappointment that the Army did not choose to build the office complex on federally owned property in Springfield.

   Northern Virginia officials have sought to focus development in areas with mass transit as a way to relieve debilitating traffic congestion. The Springfield location would have been within walking distance of Metro and VRE. Army officials ruled out that site because of cost and time constraints.

   “I’m very disappointed,” Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) said. “It belonged at the Springfield site. The problem was the Army was under the gun. [But] I think if we emphasize bus service and van and carpooling, we could make the best of this situation.”

   The Army’s decision is part of a larger base realignment plan announced by the Pentagon in 2005. The plan calls for moving nearly 20,000 Washington area defense jobs, most of them in Arlington County, to more-secure locations. Most of the jobs will go to Fort Belvoir and the nearby Engineer Proving Grounds, but Army officials agreed to shift 6,400 of the workers to a third location to reduce the likely adverse effect on traffic at Belvoir.

   “We would have needed hundreds of millions of dollars in traffic improvements” if the Army had pursued its original plan of putting all the jobs at Fort Belvoir and the Engineer Proving Ground, said Assistant Army Secretary Keith E. Eastin in an interview Monday. “Without those kinds of improvements, the area just couldn’t take it.”

   On his monthly call-in show on WTOP (103.5 FM) yesterday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) said he would have preferred the Springfield location because of its proximity to transit. However, he said he was relieved that the jobs were being shifted away from Fort Belvoir.

   “I don’t think it’s optimal,” he said. But “putting the jobs right on the Belvoir footprint . . . would have been, I think, nearly a disaster in terms of transportation infrastructure.”

   Jim Curren, a transportation consultant for the Army, said the effect on traffic would be negligible with enough planning — an assertion that was met with skepticism by some state and Fairfax County officials.

   Mark Center Chosen As Final BRAC Site
   Lack of easy Metro access cited by those opposed to decision.

   By Chuck Hagee, Gazette
   Thursday, October 02, 2008

   After months of delay and maneuvering the U.S. Department of the Army announced Monday afternoon that the Mark Center in Alexandria, just off Interstate 395, will be the site of the new home for the last contingent of 19,300 personnel being transferred to Fort Belvoir as a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Report (BRAC). It won out over two other competing sites to house the 6,400 personnel of the Washington Headquarters Services.

   Known in military terms as BRAC 133, WHS is a collection of Defense Department-level agencies that have been scattered throughout various rental spaces, primarily in the Arlington area. They will now be concentrated in two high-rise buildings to be constructed on 16 acres of land at Mark Center that will officially become an appendage of Fort Belvoir.

   Two other sites under consideration, the Victory Center on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria and the GSA Warehouses in the Springfield area, were passed over by the Department of the Army. In arriving at the Mark Center decision, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment Keith Eastin, noted “the Army considered multiple factors, including project timelines, transportation management and site adaptability.”

   Under BRAC law, signed passed by Congress and signed by the president, all transfers must be complete by Sept. 15, 2011. It is also stipulated that the Department of the Army must own all BRAC sites and that the sites become part of Fort Belvoir.

   THE PERSONNEL of BRAC 133 will be the only contingent not located on land that was already a part of the existing Fort Belvoir. The largest element to be transferred to Fort Belvoir as a result of BRAC is the 8,500 personnel of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency which will be located at Belvoir’s Engineering Proving Grounds in the Springfield area adjacent to the yet to be completed final links of the Fairfax County Parkway.

   The Army will now buy the vacant acreage at Mark Center owned by Duke Realty Corporation and then sign a construction contract with them to build the 17 and 15 story towers to house the BRAC 133 workforce, according to Peter Scholz, senior vice president, Duke Realty.

   “We are extremely excited about being chosen. I have been with the Winkler Company [Mark Center owner] for 16 years and this is one of the most significant events I have been a part of,” Scholz said.

   “We will have this site constructed and operational by the Sept. 15, 2011 deadline. The land sale will take place prior to January 2009 and construction will begin immediately. Both elements are part of a single agreement between the Army and Duke Realty,” he said.

   ONE OF THE PRIME criticisms of the Mark Center site, by those pushing for the Victory Center and the GSA Warehouses, was its lack of accessibility to Metro. The GSA site is served by the Springfield Metro located within a block and Virginia Rail Express while the Victory Center is within two blocks of the Van Dorn Metro Station. Neither mass transit facility is close to Mark Center, which is tucked between Interstate 395, Seminary Road and Beauregard Street in Alexandria. Both DASH and Metro bus serve the area.

   But, right from their initial proposal, Duke Realty had developed plans to compensate for the lack of Metro proximity. “We feel we’ve come up with a very functional multi-modal transportation center that will provide access and connectivity to various buses, including the Army transportation system, car pools and other transportation services,” Scholz said.

   “This center is actually a mini version of the Pentagon Transportation Center. We already have a shuttle system to the Pentagon Metro Station. We will be expanding that,” he said.

   “The requirement for parking by the government is just over 4,000 vehicles. This is a little less than was approved by the Alexandria Planning Commission when we went before them with a plan to expand Mark Center,” Scholz said.

   “The Mark Center site resolves security issues, improves space requirements and mission relationships and minimizes changes to existing living, working, and quality of life issues,” Eastin said.

   James Turkel, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who led the evaluation team on site selection, buttressed that. “Mark Center minimizes to the greatest extent practicable disruption of current commuting needs and mission coordination requirements of the workers. It will also require little or no change in contractor support relationships, as well as changes to residency or schools requirements for workers,” Turkel said.

   THAT ASSESSMENT was not shared by Supervisor Jeffrey McKay (D-Lee). “This decision is not only devastating to Fairfax County but to all the workers who are going to have to commute to this site. This is a prime example of one dumb land-use decision after another,” he said.

   “I don’t care what kind of transportation center they say they have or will be developing, it is not as convenient as simply having easy access mass transit. It’s a step backward on work commuting theory,” McKay said.

   “And, to make it worse they are taking people who have been used to very convenient mass transit in Crystal City and the Pentagon and now telling them they are going to be transferring to buses and other modes. Everyone knows that the secret to mass transit ridership is making it convenient. The Army is doing just the opposite,” he said.

   “I also don’t know how the City of Alexandria can take such a lucrative piece of real estate off their tax rolls in this economic climate. It’s just a very bad decision all around,” McKay said.

   Alexandria Mayor William D. Euille had a very different take. “The Department of Defense’s decision to purchase this site and construct a major office building complex, within close proximity to Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon, affirms Alexandria as one of the top locations in the region,” he said.

   “Our quality of life is unmatched in the region, and the quality of our neighborhoods, vibrancy of our commercial areas, and low crime rate make the city a great place to live and work. We look forward to welcoming WHS’ employees in 2011,” Euille said.

   “It is satisfying to know that when DoD considered many sites in Northern Virginia, Alexandria had both of the top two private sector sites as finalists. This demonstrates our work in expanding Alexandria’s economic development opportunities and creating a government responsive to those wishing to relocate their offices,” he said.

   The most philosophical about the Army’s decision to choose Mark Center was Joseph B. Brennan, senior vice president, Government Investor Services for Jones Lang LaSalle, one of the triad owners/developers of the Eisenhower Avenue Victory Center. “We basically came in second on price,” he said.

   One of the basic BRAC requirements is that whatever site was chosen it was to be owned by the Army and become an extension of Fort Belvoir. “All along our strategy has been to lease this site and not sell it. However, during the course of negotiations we made the Army, a purchase offer and that price may have influenced their decision,” Brennan said, not divulging that asking price.

   “But, just being in the process has helped us with other military and government clients we have been consistently pursuing. We were thoroughly vetted by both the Corps of Engineers and DoD which makes us more desirable to other federal agencies,” he said.

   The existing 600,000-square-foot Victory Center building is presently undergoing renovation. The site also includes space for another multi-level office building plus two parking garages.

   THE AREA’S TWO congressmen were split in their reaction to the Army’s decision. U.S. Rep. Thomas Davis III (R-11) “declared victory” over the selection of Mark Center while U.S. Rep. James P. Moran (D-8) expressed disappointment at the Army’s failure to locate the Washington Headquarters Services at the GSA Warehouse site.

   “It helps because it reduced the number of people who will go to the Engineering Proving Ground facility in Springfield. The bad news is that Mark Center is not served by Metro. But this still represents a huge victory for Northern Virginia commuters,” Davis said.

   “The Army’s decision was predicated solely on meeting BRAC’s arbitrary 2011 deadline,” said Moran. “While I’m disappointed the GSA Warehouse was not chosen, the push to redevelop that site will continue. A location so close to Metro should be housing workers, not documents and equipment.”

   “Preventing the WHS from moving to the Engineering Proving Ground benefits the region’s commuters. Transportation studies showed that locating the WHS there, as dictated by the Army’s original plan, would increase commuting time by two to three hours per day,” Moran said.

   Both seemed to ignore the fact that the EPG has not been one of the actively considered sites since early spring when the Army, local leaders, and VDOT officials agreed to cap the personnel being transferred there at 8,500 to prevent further exacerbating traffic gridlock. That only provided for NGA, which has a personnel complement of 8,500.

   “This decision again illustrates BRAC’s impact on Fort Belvoir becoming the National Capital Region’s home to support military leadership. Making the Mark Center site part of Fort Belvoir ensures we are able to place the WHS personnel in a secure facility with no leasing costs while keeping them in close proximity to the Pentagon,” said Donald N. Carr, Fort Belvoir director of public affairs.

   “We’re glad to finally know where to put the jobs — now all the pieces are in place. We can now concentrate on building the office space for the service members and federal employees who are all part of BRAC 133,” Carr said.

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