Posts Tagged ‘BRAC’

Filling space vacated by the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., is slow-going, but not as bad as commonly perceived, Michael Fascitelli, president and chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, told investors last week. “Washington today is experiencing the perfect storm: BRAC, the GSA trying to be more efficient, a presidential election and a budget standoff creating uncertainty. But we expect that moderate growth and limited supply over the next several years will stabilize the market,” Fascitelli said, according to the Washington Post. Of the 2.4 million square feet of vacancies in Arlington slated to be created through the last round of base closures for Vornado’s Washington unit, Vornado/Charles E. Smith, the real estate investment trust has re-leased or begun redeveloping 818,000 square feet. But the new leases often require the firm to lower its rates significantly.

The LRA responsible for redeveloping the former Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Mass., is close to reaching agreement with the Weymouth school system over how much it will cost to enroll school-age children of residents at the SouthField reuse project. Weymouth, located about 15 miles south of Boston, is required to educate school-age children living at SouthField under legislation passed in 2008 but the South Shore Tri-Town Development Corp. must cover the cost …

A House panel held a field hearing this week at an empty federal courthouse in Miami to publicize their campaign to ease the process for the federal government to shed excess properties. The hearing — led by Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) and Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) — was held at the 79-year-old Dyer Courthouse, which has been vacant since 2007 when a new courthouse was completed across the street. The 179,000-square-foot courthouse costs taxpayers $1.2 million a year to maintain …

The Army is looking at how eliminating about 80,000 soldiers by fiscal 2017 will affect major installations throughout the United States, Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment, said this week during the assistant secretaries roundtable at the ADC 2012 Annual Conference. The service’s assessment of the potential environmental impacts of reducing its end-strength to 490,000 active-duty soldiers will be available for public review in the next couple months, she said. The analysis stems from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act …

Now that Congress has refused to go along with the Pentagon’s request for a BRAC round in 2013, the obvious question is when lawmakers will ultimately consent to a new round. A group of defense experts convened for the ADC 2012 Annual Conference could not reach a consensus on that question. “Yes, it’s going to happen,” said Larry Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He said the Defense Department needs a new base closure round about every five years, and so the next logical date for one is 2015 …

Communities intent on staying off the BRAC list in the next base closure round shouldn’t assume the criteria used to assess installations’ relative merits in a future round will be the same as those used last time, according to Army and Air Force officials speaking during the ADC 2012 Annual Conference. They may be completely different in 2015 or 2020, Craig College, the Army’s deputy assistant chief of staff for installation management, said in response to a question from the audience. “It’s a moving target …

Lennar Corp. is several months away from signing a term sheet with the state-supported China Development Bank to invest $1.7 billion in Treasure Island and Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, two key base redevelopment projects in San Francisco. San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee last week said the loan “is very important to our city, and we’re not letting it go,” Bloomberg News reported …

Acknowledging there will not be a BRAC round next year, Secretary Panetta told more than 600 attendees Monday at the ADC 2012 Annual Conference that the nation’s fiscal challenges will continue to drive the need for DOD to pare its infrastructure at the same time it reduces its end strength. “Our budget made tough decisions to cut the size of the force. It would be irresponsible for us not to cut excess infrastructure and overhead as well,” Panetta said. And while it wasn’t a surprise that Congress shot down the department’s request to hold a new BRAC round in 2013, the Monterey native said it was an important topic to broach, and a debate that must continue …

Top administration officials now say the Defense Department never intended to carry out a BRAC round in 2013. That revelation came out at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday on the potential impact of budget sequestration when the panel questioned Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Zients. Rep. Rob Wittman asked the two witnesses to reconcile the Pentagon’s request at the beginning of the year for new BRAC rounds in 2013 and 2015 with President Obama’s comment last month that he does not support a new round of base closures …

Last week’s return of the former Fort Ritchie, Md., by Corporate Office Properties Trust to the entity originally created to oversee its reuse, PenMar Development Corp., followed a November 2009 federal court ruling that the Army failed to adequately assess the environmental impact of COPT’s new master plan. The decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by two area residents claiming that COPT’s plan was significantly different than the one approved by Pen Mar in 1997 …