The State Department wants up to 13 acres of Walter Reed
now slated for D.C. in return for giving up 13 acres of the campus to
Children's National Medical Center, sources say, but Mayor Vincent Gray says
the request threatens D.C.'s redevelopment plans for the entire site.
As the Washington Business Journal first reported in
September, Children's has had language inserted into the U.S. House version of
the fiscal 2015 National Defense Reauthorization Act that would permit the
transfer of 13.2 acres to the hospital for use as the Walter Reed Children's
Research Institute, a pediatric disease research center.
The site, comprised largely of the 375,000-square-foot
Building 54, would be carved out of 43.5 Walter Reed acres designated for a
future State Department Foreign Missions Center, not D.C.'s 66.57-acre piece of
the campus.
"Such a change would drastically shrink the land
area the District would receive and would have a devastating impact on the
District's ability to deliver on the priorities the Congress, the Army, and our
residents have expressed," Gray wrote Thursday to Secretary of the Army
John McHugh, in a letter obtained by the WBJ.
Specifically, Gray wrote, State's proposal would
"jeopardize overall redevelopment of Walter Reed," halt the
"nearly complete" negotiations between D.C. and the Army for
conveyance of the site, eliminate planned projects that would serve homeless
veterans, and "dissolve the ongoing negotiations between the District and
the private sector Master Developer selected to redevelop the District's
portion of the campus."
"Needless to say, such actions would negate years of
effort, violate the trust of all stakeholders, indefinitely delay the creation
of jobs, retail amenities, and housing, and waste millions of taxpayer dollars
spent on the Army's efforts to dispose of the Property in accordance with the
2005 BRAC," Gray wrote.
Source: Washington
Business Journal
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