Standing on the roof deck of the 16-story CACI building at Ballston Plaza last Thursday, Terry Holzheimer looked down at the buildings below and optimistically began to describe a plan to turn the surrounding landscape into a secure office park complete with one-way streets, blast-resistant glass and architectural reinforcements to protect the area's federal defense employees from terrorist attacks.
It was a plan hatched over many hours of discussions with the Department of Defense and consultants in the hope that Arlington County could find a way to make the office space it leases to the Pentagon conform to new federal anti-terrorism building standards, and stave off losing thousands of defense workers.
Holzheimer, Arlington County's economic development chief, believed the county could come to an agreement with the Defense Department. The standards would eventually be made more flexible, and rational people, he reasoned, would come to rational decisions.
Twenty-four hours later, Holzheimer was back atop the CACI building in his agency's office for a news conference, listening as U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) and Arlington County Board Chairman Jay Fisette (D) detailed the day's explosive news: A new round of recommendations for military base closings and realignments had been released, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had recommended the government abandon virtually all of the Defense Department's leased office space in Arlington. As a result, the county would lose 20,000 jobs and be left with some 4 million square feet of vacant office space.
"We were surprised," said Holzheimer, trying not to look completely shell-shocked.
While local leaders and planners had warned that the Defense Department might use new anti-terrorism standards -- which officials say are virtually impossible to comply with in an urban setting such as Arlington -- as a vehicle to relocate its leased space to military bases, few were expecting the wholesale exodus that has been recommended.
Moran, whose district includes Arlington -- home to about 60 percent of the Pentagon-leased space in Northern Virginia -- had asked Rumsfeld to ease the rules and had been predicting economic gloom for weeks.
Despite the obvious disappointment Friday, officials tried to focus on the opportunities they said remain, stressing the high-priced leases that Arlington is known to attract. Jobs leaving the county, Moran said at the news conference, would be staying in the region, most of them shifting to Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, suggesting that residents would be able to maintain their current homes. Children, would not be uprooted from local school systems, he said, and thousands of government contractors would not need to leave their county offices, he said. Others say it's too early to predict whether contractors will stay.
While Fisette tried to remain upbeat, his words rang with frustration. "We have been through these challenges before," he told those assembled. "We will survive it."
The last round of closures 10 years ago resulted in the loss of 1.2 million square feet of office space in Arlington previously leased by the Navy. Another 1 million square feet was lost in 2001 when the Naval Sea Systems Command moved from Crystal City to the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast D.C.
In December 2003, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Crystal City began a phased move of 2.3 million square feet of office space to Alexandria. Crystal City has yet to recover that lost tenant base. Today, the county's vacancy rate for leased space is 9 percent, and Crystal City's is twice that amount.
Northern Virginia's vacancy rate for leased office buildings is 11.7 percent. It was roughly 15 percent a year ago, according to CoStar Group Inc., a Bethesda-based real estate research firm.
