A Costly Shuffle

The Geospatial-Intelligence consolidation at Fort Belvoir, for example, will bring together 8,500 employees now spread among offices in Bethesda, Fairfax County and the Washington Navy Yard. About 30 percent of those workers live in Fairfax County, and another 16 percent live in Southern Maryland, making for shorter commutes in many cases, an agency analysis shows.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

"I don't see that many of our employees moving," said Navy Vice Adm. Robert B. Murrett, the agency's director.

Similarly, more than half of the current workers at Walter Reed live in Montgomery County, where their jobs will be migrating. The Navy's draft environmental report released this month predicts that "no relocation of off-base personnel is expected as a result of the proposed action" and that there will be "no significant effects on demographics."

Yet Maryland's draft "action plan" for the hospital expansion that Brown advanced last month lists school construction projects in locales far from Bethesda, among them Clarksburg and Damascus.

The bigger effect, as at Fort Belvoir, will be cars lining up at the gates to get into the hospital campus on Rockville Pike. The expanded hospital could nearly double the number of patients and visitors to more than 980,000 a year.

"If the State of Maryland cannot provide adequate infrastructure to allow for safe and effective access to and egress from the campus . . . it will have a devastating effect on the region's growth, prosperity, emergency preparedness and livability," John Carman, chairman of Montgomery's BRAC committee, warned last month.

Fort Meade's growth would be more likely to bring new residents and schoolchildren than the other bases' shifts. The biggest tenant moving in, the Defense Information Systems Agency, is bringing 4,300 jobs from Falls Church and Arlington. More than 70 percent of the current workers live in Northern Virginia, and some aren't sure they want to move with their jobs to the Anne Arundel County post.

"The initial reaction by many was not favorable," said Defense Information Systems spokeswoman Lillie Cofield, who added that most probably will not make the decision for another year.

Maryland could also see a surge in home and school construction north of Baltimore when 9,000 government positions move from Fort Monmouth, N.J., to Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Elsewhere, Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County will gain about 400 workers, mostly from space leased in Arlington by the Air Force and Air National Guard headquarters. And more than 2,600 jobs will move down Interstate 95 to Quantico Marine Corps Base, with the consolidation of the Navy, Army and Air Force criminal investigative services.

The movement away from mass transit and the lack of federal money for infrastructure improvements make it incumbent upon the state governments to act, Hoyer said. "I think the state understands its obligations."

"It won't be easy," Lt. Gov. Brown acknowledged, "but we believe there's a will there. Sure there are a lot of challenges, but a lot of opportunity, too."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.