By Spencer S. Hsu and D'Vera Cohn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 14, 2005; A01
The Pentagon announced plans yesterday to close the District's Walter Reed Army Medical Center and abandon more than 4 million square feet of leased office space in Arlington and Alexandria, proposing a massive shift of defense workers and economic investment toward communities outside the Capital Beltway. The dislocations within the Washington region are part of a new round of base closings and realignments that would eliminate about 180 military installations nationwide with the goal of saving nearly $49 billion over 20 years. If approved by Congress and President Bush, the changes would take effect over the next six years. Overall, Maryland emerged as one of the biggest winners in the country under the plan, and Virginia also would experience a net gain statewide in military and civilian jobs. But the close-in Northern Virginia suburbs would lose more than 20,000 jobs, victims of the Pentagon's effort to move out of aging office buildings that do not meet security requirements imposed since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Walter Reed, the 96-year-old flagship of military medicine and hospital to several U.S. presidents, is targeted for closure because it is old and underused, Pentagon officials said. Some of its 5,630 workers would move to a renamed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. Communities near military bases outside the Beltway, meanwhile, stand to gain from a shift of billions of dollars in Pentagon payrolls, defense contractor spending and construction. The Pentagon's plan would move more than 18,000 jobs to Fort Belvoir in southeastern Fairfax County, 5,361 to Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County and 3,013 to the Marine Corps base at Quantico. Nationwide, 33 major bases would be shuttered, including Fort Monroe in Virginia, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, the 200-year-old Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, Fort McPherson in Georgia and Naval Submarine Base New London in Connecticut. "Our current arrangements, designed for the Cold War, must give way to the new demands of the war against extremism and other evolving 21st-century challenges," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in releasing the list. The plan now goes before the nine-member Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which will make its recommendation Sept. 8 to Bush, who must accept or reject the list in full and submit it to Congress by Sept. 23. Roughly 85 percent of the changes proposed in earlier rounds of base closings have stuck. For the Washington area, the net loss would be about 10,000 jobs, an insignificant drop in a region that employs about 2.9 million. But in some jurisdictions, officials were braced for huge changes. Arlington leaders said the county will lose about 10 percent of its employee and commercial office base if the plan to move workers out of leased space near the Pentagon goes through. They had been expecting such a move because of new Defense Department requirements that its workers be housed in buildings set back at least 82 feet from traffic to protect against truck bombs. Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), while upbeat about the picture statewide, vowed to fight the loss of the leases. "My view is we need to work with the commercial landowners and help . . . retrofit the buildings so we can meet the security concerns," he said. "It's going to be uphill." In Fairfax County, officials were worried about the opposite problem: how to accommodate a surge in workers and residents in and near Fort Belvoir, which is the county's largest employer with about 23,000 civilian and military personnel. Nearby roads already are clogged, and officials talked yesterday with members of Congress about extending Metrorail to the area. Fairfax Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly predicted that the base realignment and closure process would affect Fairfax more than any rezoning in history. "This is a seismic kind of event that creates its own tsunami," he said. Stephen Fuller, a regional economist at George Mason University, said the Pentagon's proposal could damage the economies in Arlington and Alexandria. But he said the Northern Virginia economy would remain strong because the Pentagon needs facilities in the area and so do other government agencies. "If fully implemented, it's going to be very disruptive and hurt Arlington the worst, because its office space is not as new," he said. "But it may also be that those buildings are prime candidates for demolition and reconstruction." Fuller said the impact of the Pentagon's plans will depend in part on whether its moves are spread out over time or done all at once. As a cautionary tale, he mentioned the Navy's decision to move offices from Crystal City to Southern Maryland several years ago. "A lot of that space emptied at the end of the '90s, and some of it is still vacant," he said. Reps. James P. Moran Jr. (D) and Thomas M. Davis III (R) of Northern Virginia said that if jobs leave the region, the military risks a brain drain because skilled technical workers would take other jobs rather than uproot their families. Land-use and transportation experts said the recommendations would add to the region's sprawl. "It will be one more contributor to the dispersal of jobs away from the city," said Alan E. Pisarski, a travel behavior analyst and author of "Commuting in America." Many of the defense-related jobs being eliminated in Arlington and Alexandria are easily accessible by bus and rail, and most jobs being added in outer locations are not. But the Pentagon's plan to move jobs outward echoes where residential development is going, so some commuters may end up with a short neighborhood drive to work rather than a long slog up Shirley Highway. "There will be fewer people who can get to work on Metrorail," said Ron Kirby, director of transportation planning for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. "But there also will be a number of people who are driving who will be closer to their jobs. That's the positive side of it." At the Crystal Gateway complex in Arlington, one of the affected office buildings, workers who live near Fort Belvoir or Quantico welcomed the news that many defense jobs would be moved there. "I wouldn't mind moving," said Donald Neher, a software engineer who works for defense contractor Anteon Corp. "Fort Belvoir is only two miles away from home." Neher carried a copy of the Pentagon report, with all the Crystal City office buildings highlighted in yellow. He said feelings about the moves tended to break along geographic lines -- with workers who live in Maryland groaning about longer commutes and workers in Virginia happy about shorter ones. In the District, where job losses would total nearly 6,500, Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) called the cuts "a terrible shame," while Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) vowed to fight "a big, unprecedented bite" out of the city's economy. "A city without a state cannot simply absorb the loss," Norton said. "Step one is to turn this proposal back. If that fails, we must insist on appropriate compensation." Pentagon officials said that they are weighing the future of the 113-acre Walter Reed campus in Northwest Washington and that it could be converted to military housing and research. Most of Walter Reed's services would be moved to the Bethesda military hospital, which would get a $200 million expansion to 300 beds, or to a new $500 million, 165-bed Fort Belvoir hospital. The changes in military medical care in the region could save more than $100 million a year, said Air Force Surgeon General George P. Taylor. The reorganized military medical center in Bethesda "will be the centerpiece of military health care," he said, rivaling "Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins and the other great medical institutions of the world." State and local leaders said it will take weeks to sort out all the details in the plan. Late yesterday, Maryland officials discovered a change initially concealed because of secrecy provisions: the proposed shift to Fort Belvoir of 2,800 jobs from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters in Bethesda. Virginia officials also warned that an additional 27,000 workers remain in leased space that does not meet the new security requirements but was not affected by yesterday's announcement. Those jobs may be moved once those leases expire. Marine Lt. Col. Rose-Ann L. Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman, suggested that the Defense Department might ease the setback rule at "existing buildings where the required level of protection can be mitigated and shown to be achieved." A Pentagon spokesman added, however, that studies and assessments need to be done at each location. Staff writers Henri E. Cauvin, David Cho, Tim Craig, Annie Gowen, Dana Hedgpeth, Lori Montgomery and Brigid Schulte contributed to this report.