Homeland Security Headquarters: Is The 'Fix' In?

Neal Peirce

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration claims it is for smart growth. But on its most critical growth choice yet--a headquarters location for the new Department of Homeland Security--it's careening into sprawl and traffic congestion.

Acting in almost total secrecy, administration operatives have been negotiating with owners of privately owned Virginia office buildings that could house the new agency.

But don't think the three possible locations are like the Pentagon--just across the Potomac River from Washington. Rather, they're quite distant from the nation's capital. The apparently most-favored site is a vacant office building in Chantilly, Va., 27 miles from the White House and 15 miles beyond the Capital Beltway. Two others are at Tysons Corner, 11 miles out.

Perhaps even more serious, not one of the favored sites is anywhere near a stop of Metro--the traffic-relieving subway system that the nation's taxpayers paid $10 billion to build. Any one of the Bush administration's locations would add thousands of daily auto commutes on Northern Virginia roads that are already notorious for their daily traffic congestion.

The new department is expected to have a work force of about 177,000 people. Most of these, in departments ranging from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Coast Guard, will serve all across the country. Just 2,000 or so would likely be at the headquarters locations. But they, in turn, may well draw thousands of workers for consultant firms--the familiar "Beltway Bandits."

And the Homeland Security Department, first of the new century, will have symbolic importance.

First, there's our American nationhood. Do we want our leading public buildings to be located in a proud and monumental national capital? Or, are we about to opt instead for isolated suburban buildings--the kind of anonymous structures that could just as well serve as offices for dot-com programmers or plastic surgeons? (At a five-year lease bill, incidentally, of about $340 million.)

Maybe the Bush camp is thinking in terms of maximum potential security. If so, the logical rejoinder is that any self-respecting terrorist, whether attacking by aircraft or truck, spreading germs from a crop-duster or planting a bomb, can hit a suburban target just as easily as one in the federal capital.

Years ago, the instinctively secretive Central Intelligence Agency moved to an isolated Northern Virginia location--only to have two of its workers greeted by and shot down by a gun-wielding terrorist on the entrance road.

Even so, if one's "going suburban"--and the Bush administration may think its political constituency is there--it seems absurd not to locate the new department in the immediate neighborhood of a Metro station. The department's workers would then at least have a choice in how they get to work. And the government would have a choice if it wants to send those workers home, or get them to work, under emergency conditions.

The fact is there are a number of excellent, Metro-served locations across the Washington region available for Homeland Security. The Washington-area Coalition for Smarter Growth and the Sierra Club named several last week--Crystal City at Arlington, Waterside Mall in the District, and any one of 13 relatively empty Metro station stops in Maryland.

What's doubly alarming about the Bush crowd's rush to push the Homeland Security office lease out to speculative office buildings in suburbia is how many reasons exist not to go there. Washington-area roads--especially in Northern Virginia--are among America's most hopelessly clogged. Drivers typically spend two weeks a year stuck in traffic. The region has seriously worsening air; indeed it currently faces "upgrade" to federal "severe nonattainment" status, with no clear way out of its predicament.

So why would an administration push a new federal department out to Virginia--unless it's guilty of monumental shortsightedness, or there's some political "fix"?

The local debate has been all about which jurisdiction--Virginia, Maryland, or the District--gets the new departmental headquarters. On that measure, the District, with its fragile economic base and serious loss of government jobs over recent years, ought to be the preferred bidder. If we want a strong national capital (and I admit prejudice--I live here), then this is where discretionary government investment should flow.

But Greater Washington, like most American regions, is now an amalgam of political jurisdictions. Workers cross state and county borders, in immense numbers, each day. Maybe it's not so critical where rank-and-file employees actually perform their tasks.

But the centers of true power are another issue. As one "pro" in government locations told me last week: "I guarantee that if the headquarters go to Chantilly or Tysons Corner, the secretary of Homeland Security and his coterie will insist on a suite of offices in the Old Executive Office--right beside the White House. They'll want to be where the real action is."

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.