A Costly Shuffle

"Maryland is overjoyed at what happened with the base realignment commission," Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) said in an interview.

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"Our first line of defense was to make sure we didn't lose."

Visions of Gridlock

With a federal mandate to complete the job shifts by 2011, construction is not waiting for roads. At Fort Belvoir, the Army broke ground Nov. 8 on a 120-bed hospital on the old South Nine golf course.

In September, a bevy of military officials launched an even larger project, a 2.4 million-square-foot headquarters building for 8,500 employees of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Traffic is a particular concern for that project because it sits on Fort Belvoir's Engineer Proving Ground, an 800-acre tract west of Interstate 95 that lacks the road network serving the main post. Without road improvements, a study projected three- to four-hour traffic jams there.

Such traffic concerns prompted the Army and Northern Virginia leaders to begin looking at seven alternative sites for another agency, Washington Headquarters Services, which was slated to move to the proving ground.

Beneath the tent at the Geospatial-Intelligence groundbreaking, Fairfax County Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman (D-Lee) was skeptical that roads would be ready for the onslaught of commuters.

"Until I smell the asphalt in the morning, I don't believe it," he said. "The bottom line is, everyone will be stuck in traffic if we don't make it happen. September 2011 is going to be here before anybody's ready, if we're not careful."

The base realignment recommendations approved by the White House and Congress in 2005 reflected then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's vision of consolidating the force and moving out of leased facilities onto more secure -- and ultimately less costly -- military installations.

But the money savings touted as part of the plan are diminishing. A report released last week by the Government Accountability Office says the costs will reach $31 billion, $10 billion more than estimated in 2005. And the expected savings have fallen to about $4 billion a year, 5 percent less than estimated.

In the Washington region, the most immediate economic impact will be felt in the construction industry. In Northern Virginia alone, BRAC-related building is expected to total $6.2 billion by 2011, with an estimated 23,600 jobs generated next year. Construction at the Bethesda hospital, which will add or renovate more than 1.6 million square feet of building space, is expected to total at least $839 million and employ more than 5,500 workers.

"In the short term, the construction is all the impact of BRAC, by and large," said Fuller, who said the effect probably will offset "what might otherwise have been a significant slow-down" in commercial building. The realignment will not necessarily translate to a boom in building new homes or schools, especially if workers don't move closer to their new jobs.