BRAC Work Has A Way To Go

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Fayetteville (NC) Observer
September 21, 2008
By Henry Cuningham, Staff writer
If all goes according to plan, the command that oversees the flow of most of the Army’s combat-ready units overseas will be up and running on Fort Bragg in three years.
Forces Command and Army Reserve Command will have relocated from Atlanta to a 630,000-square-foot headquarters on Fort Bragg.
Fayetteville’s airport will have regular, direct flights to Washington.
Bragg Boulevard will be closed to civilian traffic, but cars will zip unimpeded through Fort Bragg on a six-lane Murchison Road.
Pope Air Force Base will have become an Army airfield, and the 7th Special Forces Group will be launching its Latin American missions from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
That’s the best-case scenario — if everything is done on schedule by the Sept. 15, 2011, deadline.
But here — at the midpoint of the changes to Fort Bragg and Pope ordered under the 2005 Base Closure and Realignment (or BRAC) law — little of the major work has been done. That has raised questions about whether all of the projects will be completed on time.
At Fort Bragg, the worst-case scenario is not pleasant. Forces Command, which oversees eight of the Army’s 10 active-duty combat divisions as well as the training of the Army Reserve and National Guard, could be operating from temporary quarters in a 1950s elementary school. Bragg Boulevard could be closed and sending traffic onto a clogged Murchison Road or open and creating a security hazard for the “Pentagon South” a mile away. High-level headquarters staff could be cooling their heels at Fayetteville’s airport, waiting for flights to Charlotte or Atlanta to make connections. The 7th Group could be trying to figure out if it lives on a North Carolina Army post or a Florida Air Force base.
“It’s not going to get easier,” said Col. James B. Balocki, chief of the Army’s BRAC Division in Arlington, Va. “It’s going to get harder between now and 2011. We are prepared for that, but that is a challenge.”
Command headquarters
Gen. Charles C. Campbell is optimistic. He is the commander of Forces Command, which is supposed to move from Fort McPherson in south Atlanta to Fort Bragg.
And he has his eye on a key piece — perhaps the key piece — of the BRAC puzzle: The construction of a headquarters building for Forces Command and the Reserve Command.
In April, the Army named four finalists in the competition to get the contract to design and build the headquarters. The Army is funding $292 million for the building — $36 million short of current cost estimates, said Fort Bragg planner Glen Prillaman.
Fort Bragg engineers hope that a contract will be awarded this month. They also hope there will be no “major technical discussions and price negotiations,” Prillaman said. Balocki, the Army BRAC chief, points out that the cost of everything from fuel to building materials is rising.
Campbell is counting on the job being done.
“What the industry is capable of doing today is markedly different than what they were able to do decades ago,” Campbell said.
The maximum time to finish the headquarters will be three years. Campbell wants it done six months sooner.
“I’m hopeful that they are going to be able to complete the construction somewhere between the preferred time and the maximum time to give us the flexibility we need to complete the move by September (2011),” Campbell said.
The war, Campbell is quick to point out, is not going to stop and wait for the headquarters to move.
But Campbell is not as worried about the bricks and mortar as he is about shaping his future work force. Forces Command has about 1,350 workers, and about half are civilians, many of them eligible to retire. The Reserve Command has about the same numbers.
Soldiers have to move when the command shifts from Atlanta to Fort Bragg. Civilians don’t.
“Our expectation is that a good portion of that work force will not choose to leave Atlanta,” he said. “They have deep roots in Atlanta.”
The lawmakers did not provide incentives to lure the experienced civilian workers from one place to another for BRAC moves, he said.
“This is a phenomenon common to governance of the United States,” Campbell said. “The people that legislated the law are the people that didn’t appropriate enough money to implement the law.”
All that means that both Forces Command and the Reserve Command may have to hire or promote people who won’t have the experience of their current work force.
Other needs
The move of the two commands from Fort McPherson is the centerpiece of the BRAC changes at Fort Bragg, making the headquarters construction a linchpin of the project. But there are other areas where significant work remains: among them, the widening of Murchison Road, the transfer of Pope to Fort Bragg, and the questions surrounding the Fayetteville airport.
Congress is still working on final approval for funding the first phase of the widening of the road that — like Bragg Boulevard — leads from Fayetteville’s downtown to Spring Lake. The first phase, set to begin in 2009, would take the project from the planned Interstate 295 interchange to the Honeycutt Road intersection on Fort Bragg. The original projected cost of $13.2 million has climbed to $21.8 million.
The second portion, which would extend the widening to Spring Lake, remains unfunded.
The purpose is to provide an easy access across Fort Bragg well away from sensitive areas of the post — especially the new headquarters building. A wider Murchison Road would make it less of an inconvenience to close Bragg Boulevard on the post for security reasons.
At this point, the alternate route is far from complete, but so is the headquarters.
When the headquarters is up, the question will become whether the security risks of Bragg Boulevard are sufficient to force its closure even if Murchison Road is unfinished, said Paul Dordal, executive director of the Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base BRAC Regional Task Force.
“If it becomes an issue with a four-star headquarters operating with that many people in it, is that a threat severe enough that they want to shut down Bragg Boulevard?” he asked.
Pope questions
Col. Dave Fox, Fort Bragg’s garrison commander, likes to point out that the 2005 BRAC law has a single sentence about Fort Bragg taking over Pope Air Force Base. The Air Force is directed to “transfer real property accountability to the Army.”
“Not a lot of instruction in that,” Fox says.
Pope Air Force Base’s Col. John McDonald agrees.
“The biggest challenge we have exists in defining what the transfer of real property means,” McDonald said. “There’s a difference of opinion what that means.”
The people who operate Fort Bragg and Pope have said they can usually work things out pretty well between them, but the Army staff and the Air Force staff at the Pentagon have to sign off on this one.
There are issues who pays bills and who provides services, McDonald said.
Fort Bragg operates Simmons Army Airfield and the Camp Mackall airfield, but nothing on the magnitude of Pope’s Green Ramp, where the 82nd Airborne Division loads up and takes off for war and training.
“I’m very optimistic,” McDonald said. “If you look at BRAC law, we’ve done a lot of things. We’re moving in the right direction.”
The Army and Air Force also must work together on the move of the 7th Special Forces Group from Fort Bragg to Eglin Air Force Base.
The BRAC law also directs the establishment of the country’s first integrated joint training site for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is still in development.
The federal government has done a draft environmental impact assessment and is sifting through public comments. The final report, which will include the Air Force’s response to comments, is not finished.
Before building can begin, the military will have to finish the environmental reports and then chose among alternatives for locating housing areas and shooting ranges. Engineers will have to take everything into account from endangered species to how long it takes to get to the training ranges.
Flight access
While the Army and Air Force work out BRAC deals over the next few years, there is one piece of the puzzle that is out of either of their hands.
Fayetteville has a small airport. The Army is used to having a big one nearby in south Atlanta, with flights anywhere they want to go. It’s a 10-minute train ride from Fort McPherson to the airport.
Currently, Fayetteville has no direct flight to Washington, the minimum the military leaders want. But providing civilian flights is an issue that has to be decided by the civilian airlines.
The problem comes into sharp focus in Fayetteville, where a small civilian airport feeds flights into Charlotte and Atlanta. There is no direct service from Fayetteville to Washington, D.C.
Dordal, a retired Air Force brigadier general, has been working on the issue with the airlines and N.C. Department of Transportation.
Dordal’s task force has worked to identify BRAC-related problems and solutions in the civilian community, but it’s hard to get money to build schools for students who have not arrived, and it’s likewise hard to get flights for passengers who are not here yet.
“I don’t see us getting any resolution on that until Forces Command actually moves here, even though we continue our discussion with the airlines and with North Carolina Department of Transportation,” he said.
The flight issue is like many of the BRAC pieces: There’s a lot of work ahead.
Balocki, the Army BRAC chief, summed up the status this summer at a presentation in Washington.
“We’re halfway through,” he said, “but not halfway done.”
 
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