GSA Lost in a “Smog” of Its Own Making
subtitle: Losing Seriously to Air Pollution
It’s hard to believe that in relocating the neglected FBI headquarters from downtown DC due to concentration of law enforcement personnel in the face of terrorist attacks, the GSA has removed site proximity to Metro/MARC/public bus transportation from the list of determining factors for a new location.
The existing 2.8M s/f HQ, aka the J. Edgar Hoover Building, was designed in the so-called Brutalist architectural style of the 1960s. It’s not particularly loved for its example. (Another of this style of the same era is the “neo-penitentiary modern” Hirshhorn Museum, also in DC.)
Of the 3 sites under consideration, only the Greenbelt, MD, site has proximity to the Metro. Actually, the site is a current parking lot for that Metro station. The other sites are in Landover, MD, and Springfield, VA. The Landover site is about 2 miles from the nearest Metro station. The Springfield site is more than a mile from its nearest Metro station.
In a recent hearing on the matter, National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) Chairman Peter Bryant told William Dowd, GSA overseer for the FBI project: “It sounds like … you’ve looked at what the NCPC provides in the way of guidance for this and you’ve determined that you know better.” (source: The Washington Post, 3/13/16)
Further, according to the article, the GSA is planning on building “thousands more parking spaces than originally envisioned.” Possibly informing this thinking is a National Institutes of Health plan last year to add 1,000 parking spaces at its Bethesda campus because, as an NIH official was quoted as saying at the time: “… ‘high-ranking scientists’ couldn’t be expected to ride transit like ‘regular people’.”
Exacerbating planning efforts is the fact that the GSA overestimated the number of FBI employees who would take public transit to the new location, ergo underestimating the amount of paved parking. (I’m imagining lessening the damage a bit by the use of pervious paving, but am not confidant.) Telecommuting is usually unavailable to FBI employees.
This free-fall from sensible planning in one of the two most air polluted regions of the U.S. approaches gross negligence, not to mention further environmental degradation.
What would Hoover himself say about this? “I don’t give a […] about the air. We’re fighting crime!” And your blogger? “But, Mr. Director, this negligence is a crime.”
The first example of this terrorism-inspired disaggregation caught my attention a few years ago when I learned that under BRAC the Pentagon was moving some 6,400 employees from Crystal City where public transit is in abundance to what’s called the Mark Center in Alexandria. Mark Center is nowhere near a Metro. There is bus service.
More Investigation / Greater Justice required!!
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P.S. The Metro system was shut down yesterday without much notice, and remains shuttered today for system-wide maintenance of electric cable connectors. Obviously a major inconvenience to public transit commuters. But, the system has been taking cars off the road for 40 years.