Remember when the Pentagon said that traffic on I-395 wouldn’t be that much worse when thousands of federal workers are transferred to the Mark Center in Alexandria, Va.?
Well, that assessment may not be so accurate.
A new federal report accuses the Department of Defense of using faulty data when it justified moving more than 6,000 DoD workers to the massive facility in Alexandria.
The report, by the Defense Department’s inspector general, claims traffic studies the Army used didn’t take into consideration “existing and projected peak hour volumes.”
Commuters, as one can imagine, aren't too pleased. But they're not the only ones. Congressman Jim Moran forwarded the report to Fairfax County and Alexandria leaders. He’s encouraging them to use it to file a lawsuit, asking for an injunction to block the move, slated for September.
“This is what we’ve been saying for the last four years,” Moran told the Washington Post. “Now we have the inspector general saying that their justification was faulty and deficient.”
It still isn’t clear whether Fairfax County and Alexandria officials will actually file that lawsuit. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova issued a statement Thursday saying the board will weigh its legal options in closed session at a meeting on Tuesday.
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The Army issued the following response to NBC Washington's Aaron Gilchrist:
"The U.S. Army non-concurred with Finding 1. We acknowledge that the TMP and other studies have shown some increase in traffic volumes and more traffic congestion than the EA analysis at some locations. However, the increased current traffic is not reflective of an overall trend, but rather, reflective of local conditions related to the construction workforce.
"The U.S. Army partially concurred with Finding 2, generally accepting the points made in Finding 2. However, the Army did not agree that 'the proposed Transportation Coordinator staffing will be insufficient for the range of services and programs described in the TMP,' because the 'TMP reflects that there will be a team assigned to the task of transportation coordination' and 'the Transportation coordinator will have access to and the support of the Transportation Services office of the Washington Headquarters Services which serves the Pentagon and other DoD facilities in the National Capitol Region'."
The massive Mark Center is currently under construction in Alexandria, just off of I-395. Most of the 6,400 or so employees who will be moved there work right now in Crystal City, where they have access to Metro and other forms of mass transit. Most of those workers will have to drive to their new offices.
