Posts Tagged ‘base redevelopment/environmental cleanup’

The Defense Department recently completed a multi-million dollar headquarters for the Army Reserve at Joint Forces Training Base Los Alamitos in Southern California, but at least one local official wants the city to have a backup plan in case the installation is closed. “I would like to see the formation of a base closure committee,” Los Alamitos Councilman Richard Murphy said last week. “It’s amazing to me that we don’t have one.” Even if there is only a small chance that the base is shuttered, said Murphy, prudent planning should prompt the city to be ready. “If you follow the budget cuts in the military, I think there’s going to be more and more serious budget cuts under this administration,” he said. “We need to go through the exercise of preparing for that.”

Negotiations between the Army and the Fort Monroe Authority have lasted much longer than expected due to a dispute over the value of the portions of the property not slated to revert to the commonwealth of Virginia. The Army is asking for a figure that is 10 times the value estimated by the authority, LRA Executive Director Glenn Oder told the Daily Press …

Legislation sponsored by Maine’s two senators would make it easier for tenants located at bases closed in the last BRAC round to qualify for the HUBZone program, a Small Business Administration initiative offering preferential access to federal procurements to businesses in distressed areas. Currently, BRAC installations are designated as HUBZones for five years after they are formally closed. The law, however, defines the geographic boundaries of those HUBZones as the borders of the closed installation, making it extremely difficult for companies to meet one of the program’s criteria — 35 percent of their employees must live within the HUBZone …

The District of Columbia last week issued a request for qualifications from prospective firms to be the master developer for 66.6 acres at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Upper Northwest Washington. The city’s reuse plan for the site, which will feature a town center, calls for 1,864 multi-family housing units, 90 townhomes, 767,000 square feet of office space, 212,000 square feet of retail, and 176,000 square feet of other uses such as arts and entertainment …

The city of Philadelphia on Friday unveiled a new master plan for the former Philadelphia Navy Yard, a move necessitated by the remarkable investment and job growth the base has experienced since most naval activities shut down following the 1995 round of BRAC. Since 2000, when the city acquired 1,000 acres from the Navy, more than $130 million in publicly funded infrastructure improvements has leveraged more than $700 million in private investment …

The Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority gained its first commercial tenant this week after a data management software firm agreed to construct its headquarters on a 55-acre parcel at the former post located in coastal New Jersey. In the next several weeks, CommVault Systems plans to begin initial site work on the first phase of its headquarters, which includes a $70 million, 275,000-square-foot building, reported NJBIZ. The headquarters will require three construction phases over 20 years …

At a hearing of the Alameda Planning Board, housing advocates on Monday urged the city to increase the number of homes developed at the former Naval Air Station Alameda beyond what is called for in the existing reuse plan by building a mix of housing types, from apartments to single-family homes. The advocates asked city officials to assess the impact of building up to 4,500 homes at Alameda Point when they conduct an environmental study of the project’s impacts …

Last week’s sale of LNR Property LLC, the parent company of the master developer of the former South Weymouth Naval Air Station located outside of Boston, should not affect the project now called Southfield, according to Weymouth officials. On Thursday, Greenwich, Conn.-based Starwood Property Trust and Starwood Capital Group announced they had agreed to pay $1.05 billion to buy LNR …

Sacramento County and its developer McClellan Park LLC shortly will receive 528 acres of land at the former McClellan Air Force Base in the third early transfer of property at the Northern California base. In addition to accepting the parcel, the county and its developer will take on responsibility for cleaning up the first 15 feet of soil below the surface of the property …

With funding expected to be constrained for the foreseeable future, the Air Force Civil Engineer Center increasingly is looking to the private sector to help the service’s installations meet their environmental remediation, renewable energy development and maintenance needs, Center Director Joe Sciabica wrote this week in a commentary. “We can no longer count on consistent and predictable funding to meet our sustainability needs …