Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) is bad news for Maryland and for troops

BRAC concentrates traffic, funding headaches while removing our soldiers from communities around the country

• GAO: Military Base Realignments and Closures: Estimated Costs Have Increased and Estimated Savings Have Decreased, by Brian J. Lepore, director, defense capabilities and management, before the Subcommittee on Readiness, House Committee on Armed Services. GAO-08-341T, December 12. Highlights (pdf)
  
• Gazette: Navy Med expansion has issues: World-class medical center could be marred by traffic and unsafe intersections while money for potential fixes is uncertain
  
• WaPo: Naval Hospital Patients to Double: Move From Walter Reed to Bethesda Could Worsen Traffic, Add $70 Million in [unpaid] Road Work.
  

Resources for info:

• MDOT & BRAC
  
• Paying for BRAC (WaPo)
  
• Official BRAC - Home Page (MD); Montgomery County
  
• (Obsolete) State report (pdf)
  

It's not over till it's under-Tyson's Tunnel

The Tyson's Tunnel Project has implications from Bethesda to the West to Prince George's to the East, and all the way around the Beltway. Tom Davis (VA-11th) is the Republican who refuses to cooperate with Henry Waxman's fraud tip line, who threatened Va Governor Kaine when he tried to trigger use of new technology to build a tunnel through Tyson's, and who shakes down fraudulent government contractors in Iran and the Hurricane-rattled Gulf to finance the campaigns for him and his wife.

The current project is ugly.

So who has Tom Davis's ear on the Tyson's tunnel project? Not voters, but real estate magnates.

...Northern Virginia Congressmen Tom Davis and Jim Moran [were] spotted with NoVa real estate investor Joe Robert, taking in the [Wizards baskletball] game [Wed., Feb 7th] from courtside floor seats with “nice full beers,” according to our source.

Who bought the floor seats? Well, the host seemed to be Joe Robert, who according to the FEC donated $161,000 to federal, mostly Republican, candidates including over $14,000 to Davis as an individual and as RNCC Chair, to Rick Santorum, Michael Steele, and crooks like Conrad Burns. Tom Davis's PAC and his wife are both in Robert's top 10 recipients (if not for Gov. Warner almost all donations are to pro-development Republicans). Robert donated another$50,000 to state races as JE Robert Company. He is also a Washington Baseball Club member. His "charity" All Children Matter has donated almost $500,000 to Republicans in Virginia.

When you want to influence Tom Davis, be sure to bring your VIP tickets. But remember, his biggest obsession baseball.

WOW. You thought Tyson's was bad now

This is a monstrosity. Graphic credit: WaPo

Some of my friends and family in Fairfax shop at Montgomery Mall because traffic is easier to manage than traffic through Tysons. Expect more people to make the drive. If you've ever waited through 8 traffic light cycles to get through an intersection there, you already know why they make the trip.

Overhaul Of Tysons Center Approved: Decade-Long Project Will Add Towers With Offices, Apartments. (This story is getting play not just locally but all over the national business press)

The expansion, to begin next year and last a decade, will reshape the huge shopping center, which helped put the former rural crossroads of Tysons on the map 38 years ago -- and which still helps define what is now the 12th-largest business district in the country.

* * * *

Under Macerich's plans, several thousand people will live in nearly 1,400 apartments in towers rising as high as 30 stories and arrayed around the sprawling, 300-store mall like watchtowers around a fort.

The plan ignores new technology that would make a tunnel possible, even though a Tunnel Is Affordable, Advocate Group Says.

A group of Northern Virginia business leaders and residents presented detailed plans yesterday that they said prove that a Metro tunnel through Tysons Corner could be built at an affordable price, raising the pressure on Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and federal officials who have decided the underground route isn't realistic.

"Once they see this information, it will be very difficult for them to say no," said the group's leader, Scott Monett, in presenting the plans at the Fairfax County Government Center. "Now, the ball's in their court. We've given [them] what they need."