Bliss building boom a boon for local business
By Dan Huff |
A $171 million “temporary” village for the nearly 2,500 soldiers of the 4th Brigade Combat Team is “on track and on target.”
Airline passengers flying into El Paso from the east generally can see the 300-acre project on Biggs Army Airfield if they’re seated on the right side of the plane.
“It’s half a mile wide and about a mile long,” said Dave Wise, area engineer of the Southwest area office, Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
But when it comes to military construction, El Paso and Fort Bliss ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Work soon will begin on a staggeringly larger project – the $2 billion to $3 billion expansion of Fort Bliss to house the 1st Armored Division, according to Troy Collins, Fort Bliss program director for the Corps of Engineers.
And that’s good for local business even before the soldiers start spending money in the city because, Collins said, the federal government mandates that 24 percent of the contracts must go to small businesses – a category that includes local merchants and contractors.
The Biggs project is for a brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, formed under the Army’s Modular Force transformation program, and just over 80 percent complete.
The major Bliss expansion will be for 1st Armored units being relocated from Germany and Korea. Pentagon officials have said the moves would transform the post into a major mounted maneuver-training installation.
Collins said the Corps and Fort Bliss have completed the planning for the 1,500-acre expansion and officials now are putting together contract packages.
Hiring local
While a land development-engineering contract has already been let, Collins said the bulk of the contracts would be let beginning in about five months.
In addition, he said, the Corps will be looking to hire contract administrators and construction representatives to do quality management.
“We’d like to hire as many locally for these jobs as possible,” Collins said. “If we have 90 positions, we’d like them all to be local because there’s a cost savings by hiring local – we don’t have to pay to move people.”
The project is to allow Fort Bliss to accommodate an influx of as many as 25,000 troops under the Pentagon’s latest round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC).
It will take time, Collins said, adding, “Everyone recognizes that as the brigade teams come in, the permanent facilities will not be ready. So the temporary village (on Biggs), as we’ve come to call it, will be used for swing space while these incoming units are waiting on their permanent facilities.”
Work on the temporary village – which includes 392 barracks, 13 laundry facilities, 20 storage buildings, 13 dayroom facilities and 65 administration buildings – in addition to a 32,500-square-foot dining facility and five 10,000-square-foot tensioned fabric structures for combat vehicle maintenance – has been under way since August, and should be completed by May 6, Collins said.
Wise said that although it’s designated as temporary, the modular units could be around for as long as a dozen years.
“With some of the unknowns out there in the out years – I’m talking 2009 or 2010 – they’re not exactly sure when this temporary village will have pretty well served its need,” Wise said.
When the time comes, the Corps of Engineers has designed the project so the modular buildings can be moved out and replaced with permanent facilities.
“The infrastructure we put in as part of this so-called temporary village – the roads, utilities and other things – is designed to be permanent,” Wise said. “It will be just a matter of moving the modular buildings out and building permanent facilities in the same place, between the same streets and parking lots. The utilities will already be at the corner, so to speak, to serve the permanent structures.”
Tight schedule
He said the toughest part of building the temporary village has been the “extremely compressed construction schedule” the Pentagon demanded.
The village, parts of which are already occupied, is being built by Bethesda, Md.-based Clark Construction. Founded in 1906, Clark does about $2 billion annually in U.S. projects.
About 18 months ago, the company completed a similar, though smaller, project at Fort Stewart, Ga., home of the 3rd Infantry Division, the largest army installation east of the Mississippi River, Collins said.
Wise noted the Bliss village is not a low bid-type project:
“It was done under what’s called the best value procurement process, wherein the folks interested in performing the job for us had to submit a prescribed package describing their past performance history, their financial strength, references for past projects of a similar nature they completed, and then a price to do the work. All that was evaluated under some pre-set criteria. The army was after the best bang for the buck here, and we did not necessarily award, nor were we required to award, to the lowest bidder.”
Collins said the Army Corps currently has about 10 people overseeing the temporary-village project.
Besides that project and the much larger $2 to $3 billion expansion, Wise said a third project of about 350 acres is being planned at Biggs to house a combat aviation brigade (EBCT). That project will require demolition of some existing structures, he said.
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