Posts Tagged ‘growth communities’

While BRAC is providing a significant population boost to the area surrounding Fort Benning, an unrelated proposal to add up to 82,800 acres in training lands to the western Georgia post is making many residents in its neighboring counties anxious. Benning officials held four public meetings last week to collect input from residents that could be affected by one of the five alternatives the Army is considering …

With 80 percent of 4,651 positions transferring to Redstone Arsenal already arrived at the Huntsville installation, the chairman of the Tennessee Valley BRAC Committee says the transition is going very well. Most significantly, 57 percent of the 3,112 BRAC positions that have been filled at Redstone have been taken by workers who moved from outside the Tennessee Valley region …

After four years and roughly $2 billion in construction projects, the massive effort to ready San Antonio bases for BRAC 2005 is almost complete. Only several of the planned 75 facilities are still under construction, with the most prominent being the expansion and renovation of Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston …

The enormous transformation the Army has experienced over the past 10 years — counting the shift toward modular brigades, instituting the Army Force Generation model and carrying out over 100 BRAC recommendations — has reshaped the service’s infrastructure to better support soldiers, civilians and families. With the Army on target to finish its BRAC moves in September, it will have completed $13 billion in construction and renovation, and a reorganization that has affected one-third of the service …

Nearly five years after it was selected by the Army as its enhanced use leasing partner, Trammell Crow is close to reaching a final deal to build 10 office buildings at Fort Meade, Md. An agreement, which calls for the construction of 1.7 million square feet of office space, could be signed by August …

Officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base believe they will have fewer jobs in aerospace medicine to fill than expected as about 37 percent of workers whose jobs are relocating to the Dayton, Ohio, installation plan to move. Typically, only about 15 percent of civilian workers move with their jobs following a realignment …

Helping mission growth communities bracing for significant increases in traffic congestion as a result of BRAC 2005 was a recurring theme in the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill passed by the House last week, with several provisions increasing the chances for affected communities to obtain federal funds to address transportation impacts outside the gates of a military installation. During last week’s debate in the House over the legislation, Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards took up the theme, introducing an amendment intended to prevent defense communities in future base closure rounds from having to deal with the potential for gridlock outside of an installation with only limited resources …

The U.S. Census does not count military personnel serving overseas as residents of the communities where they are stationed, potentially depriving defense communities of federal funding for a variety of programs. To minimize the impact, the House Appropriations Committee is urging DOD to work with communities to ensure they have adequate resources and infrastructure to meet the needs of service members and their families …

School districts in the Chattahoochee Valley are fully aware that an influx of students will be enrolling in their schools by mid-September, but due to the uncertainty as to where the military families moving to Fort Benning, Ga., will choose to live, officials are being forced to make allowances to accommodate last-minute arrivals for the coming school year. The Muscogee County School District, which is expecting the bulk of the new school-aged children coming as a result of BRAC, is setting aside money in the budget for additional teachers and modular classrooms ….

The services have a variety of approaches they are using — or plan to — to tackle housing deficits at growth installations, according to a recent report from GAO. The tools are meant to help service members and their families obtain housing either on base or in the surrounding community. The agency found that a shortfall exists at 19 of 26 mission growth installations …