Community Corner

The BRAC Imposition: An Interview with Sharon Bulova

Part of an ongoing series with key officials.

A “big, challenging mess” is how Sharon Bulova, Chair of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, described the September influx of 19,000 federal employees to northern Virginia.

“We feel a little bit let down here, being faced with a major move, especially at the Mark Center, without some way of being able to fund and to build transportation,” said Bulova, who spoke with Patch from the Fairfax County Government Center. “Fairfax County is installing some new Connector routes and redesigning some of our Connector service that will serve both the Mark Center, but also the South County/Richmond Highway area. And we’re also going to be providing some shuttle capability from the VRE [Virginia Railway Express] Station and the Franconia-Springfield Metro Station.” 

Bulova said that Base Realignment and Closure will bring area traffic to a standstill. Commuters around Fort Belvoir and Interstate 395 in Alexandria should start planning new routes now. “Folks should be trying to identify, to the best of their ability, ways to be able to reach their new destination other than in their single-occupant vehicle. Otherwise it’s just going to be difficult,” said Bulova.

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One Year: Escaping The Inevitable 

 is currently pending in the U.S. Senate that could push back the September 15, 2011, move-in deadline for the 6,400 Washington Headquarters Services employees to Alexandria’s Mark Center off I-395 and Seminary Road by a year. But is a year enough time to avert a traffic nightmare?

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“A year is not nearly enough,” said Bulova, adding that the year would be spent implementing small traffic-calming measures. “There is no way that we would have completed some of the major improvements.”

Bulova agreed with , and that the Mark Center location brings potential national security issues to Northern Virginia. “I think the bottleneck will be significant, and I think it will make it difficult for DoD employees to respond in a timely way, should they need to,” she said.

Fairfax County will absorb thousands at Fort Belvoir’s main base and the Engineer Proving Ground in Springfield. The traffic impacts on the region will be most noticeable this fall. “The first six months and the first year, you’ll see the greatest impact on traffic, and you’ll see people start to identify ways to accommodate the additional traffic,” Bulova said. “You may have more people who take mass transit as best they can where it’s going to serve them. You’ll have people who will decide to take the bus instead of their car. People will find imaginative ways to get around the traffic congestion, and it’ll take a while for that to shake out.”

Like many public officials, Bulova is frustrated that the Federal Highway Administration is before the construction of a crucial flyover ramp to Seminary Road. “A project like that is going to take years to complete, and we haven’t even started the design of it. We’re still looking at the environmental process,” Bulova said.  

Last month, Bulova met with Dorothy Robyn, Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment. “The meeting with [Robyn], I thought, went very well. She totally understands the challenge of the location. She’s very familiar with it. And she herself was very supportive of trying to get more time,” Bulova said. “We expressed concern about the federal government choosing an EA, rather than a Categorical Exclusion for the environmental review, and we believed that that would set the project back 18 months. She said she thought that wouldn’t necessarily be the case, and she thought that there were things that could be done concurrently and in a way that could reduce the 18 months [by] maybe up to six months.”

More Than Mark Center

At the end of the day, the Base Realignment and Closure move will bring more than 19,300 DoD employees to Fort Belvoir’s main post, the Engineer Proving Ground in Springfield and Alexandria’s Mark Center. Supporting contractors will add to congestion, as will patients at the new $1 billion .

The Virginia General Assembly partnered with the County to conduct traffic studies on the Richmond Highway area for long-term improvements. “It could be a trolley, it could be bus routes, some kind of rail, but a study will happen in that area,” Bulova said. “We also have the $150 million that Congressman [Jim] Moran (D-8th) has secured to make some improvements to Richmond Highway in the area of the hospital. Those improvements will widen Richmond Highway, provide turn lanes, provide shelters for people trying to cross the road, and that will help a lot. Are we ready to start that project? No, not by September 15, but at least we’ve got funding and at least we’ve got plans.”

Last year’s completion of the Fairfax County Parkway extension will provide some relief, Bulova said. “In some places we’ve been able to construct improvements to the transportation network in anticipation of BRAC,” she said. “In particular, in the South County area, where the new hospital is going to be located, and also the new Geospatial Facility. We were able to make some transportation improvements, and that’s going to help a little bit. In other places, there are no significant improvements to the transportation network.”

For the Record 

The ideal location for the Washington Headquarters Services is not the Mark Center, Bulova said. “Fairfax County, in the beginning when they were trying to identify locations for that facility, suggested the GSA Warehouse site, which is in the Springfield area near the Franconia/Springfield Metro Station and the VRE,” she said. “So we weighed in the beginning, and we specifically expressed opposition to the Mark Center. So, Fairfax County always felt that that would be a mistake, and we were very surprised when that was chosen.

“The DoD was convinced that they had sufficient info about transportation impact, and that just wasn’t the case... [Fairfax County] advocated for locations that are better served by mass transit, or where transportation improvements could be installed. We advocated for dispersal, so that things were not all in one location. We opposed what we saw was a very bad choice, and that was the Mark Center, and then we worked with our federal representatives to try to get funding for transportation improvements. I’m not quite sure what we could have done differently.” 

Bulova stopped short of blaming Alexandria for the Mark Center decision. “I’ve never specifically said Alexandria helped make that decision happen,” she said. “It is true that there is a letter on file where they indicated that several locations would be acceptable to them and one of them was the Mark Center. I can’t say on Alexandria’s behalf what their motivation was.”

The Bottom Line

“These folks are going to be arriving at new work locations, and we need to support them,” Bulova said. “And the last thing that I want to do is to think that they’re not welcome and to think that we look negatively at their employment in Fairfax County.

"So, we’ll just do the best we can to facilitate the move and to also do right by our constituents and commuters who are already living and working in the area. So it’s going to be an enormous challenge, and we’ll do the best we can.”


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