BRAC is over' Cramer says arsenal, city can get ready after rejection effort fails in House vote
Friday, October 28, 2005
A vote to stop Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommendations failed in the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday, making elected officials confident that BRAC changes will bring almost 5,000 jobs to Huntsville over the next three years.
U.S. Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville, said Redstone and Huntsville can start preparing to gain the military work the BRAC panel recommended shifting here during its August deliberations.
"We can pretty much declare this done," Cramer said. "BRAC is over, and efforts to (cancel) it are dead. The major components slated to come to Huntsville are coming."
The next step could be a full vote of Congress on the bill, but that's not likely to happen, Cramer said. If no action is taken before Congress goes on break in December then the BRAC bill becomes law.
By law, separate votes in both the House and Senate to reject the base closing plan are required to stop it. The House defeat of moves to reject the BRAC process puts an end to this round of BRAC, Cramer said. "There's nothing (pending) in the U.S. Senate now, and they are not likely to take it up," he said.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, confirmed there was no move in the Senate to change BRAC.
"It's not completely over, but there's no indication that things will change," Sessions said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I'm very confident that what is coming to Redstone Arsenal will be placed there, and this process is pretty much wrapped up."
On a 324-85 vote, House lawmakers rejected a resolution that was put forward by U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., Thursday morning that would cancel the BRAC round.
In August, the BRAC panel voted to relocate the Army Materiel Command, the bulk of the Missile Defense Agency and the headquarters of the Army Space & Missile Defense Command from the Washington, D.C., area to Huntsville.
Sessions said the number of jobs estimated to come to North Alabama has fluctuated over the past few months since the Pentagon released BRAC recommendations in May.
"That figure is at least 4,733 at present," Sessions said.
Even that estimate could grow, Cramer said. "In the beginning we were very conservative about the number of jobs that were slated to come because we didn't want to promise something that" wasn't scheduled to be located in Huntsville, he said. "We've seen that number grow and now a conservative estimate is about 4,800 personnel, and even that number might grow in the coming weeks."
Some will leave
That 4,800 jobs number is a net gain that factors in about 1,000 Redstone jobs that would go elsewhere under the BRAC recommendation.
Units slated to leave Redstone include the U.S. Army Munitions, Ordnance and Electronics School, to be consolidated with schools at Fort Lee, Va.; a joint robotics program to be consolidated with work performed at Detroit Arsenal, Warren, Mich.; information systems development to be consolidated with work done at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.; and supply work performed for multiple missile and aviation programs to be moved to Columbus, Ohio, and Fort Belvoir, Va.
Cramer cautioned in an interview with The Times Thursday that much work is needed to "prepare a place for the people slated to come here. I've been told by defense officials that before they can even think about beginning the relocation efforts people have to have a place to work on the arsenal," Cramer said.
"We want to get them here as soon as possible, but there's work to be done in military construction budgets and infrastructure work in Huntsville," Cramer said.
Construction money
Sessions said Alabama lawmakers would have to find $419 million in military construction money over the next few years to build 1.9 million square feet of office and research space on Redstone to house the new units.
"We want to push to get this done as soon as possible, but it will take more than three years to get everything completed," Sessions said.
By law, the Pentagon has until 2011 to complete all moves laid out in the BRAC proposal.
Until office buildings are constructed on Redstone, an option would be to use leased office space in Huntsville to house defense workers, which more than likely would be cheaper and more secure, Cramer said, than the buildings now occupied in Virginia.
At the top of Cramer's improvement list is the southern bypass, or Patriot Parkway, that would improve access to and around the arsenal, he said. "Sen. (Richard) Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa) and I plan to meet with the state (Department of Transportation) soon and try to work out where we stand with the bypass," Cramer said. "We are going to need that road and don't want there to be bottlenecks going in and out of the arsenal."
The highway would cut across Redstone and has been in the planning stages for several decades. In July, Congress passed a transportation bill that included $2.4 million for planning and engineering work on the proposed Patriot Parkway.
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