Month: January 2010

O Dear Citizen of Albemarle, I know you’re excited. The Defense Intelligence Agency is here. 

Signs of intelligent life

To understand all the good that will be done for you by the Defense Intelligence Agency, let’s review exactly what the DIA does. Unfortunately, you, Citizen, are without security clearance, so you can’t know exactly what the DIA does. But this, at least, you can imagine.

The DIA—or at least a few of its departments—are coming here because of NGIC, the National Ground Intelligence Center, which used to be called the Foreign Science and Technology Center and was once housed in the Seventh Street office building now occupied by SNL Financial. In 2001, NGIC moved to shiny new digs up Route 29 North just a few miles from the Greene County line; the base was named Rivanna Station. That’s where the DIA is building its shiny new digs, officially and boringly named the Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility—at least until some politician manages to get his name on it.

NGIC’s veil of secrecy has a certain sex appeal, but their day-to-day work is probably as tedious, if not more so, than your average day of work.

The words “ground intelligence” are in NGIC’s title for a reason: NGIC’s purpose is to analyze the ground military capabilities of foreign armies. Other military intelligence agencies are dedicated to understanding the military stuff that’s in the air or in the sea. NGIC employees learn about foreign armies from spies, but NGIC employees are usually not spies themselves. They get information from organizations like the CIA—photos and videos and technical manuals and, on occasion, actual military technology—but NGIC employees aren’t in Pakistan and China and North Korea clandestinely getting it themselves. In fact, most NGIC employees are civilians.

NGIC digests all that info into reports that feed decision-makers in the U.S. Army, so they can figure out how to fight these foreign armies if it comes to that. To use a sports metaphor, NGIC takes info from scouts to draw up scouting reports, but just on the other guy’s running game and not his passing game. Working there is probably as fun as breaking down game tape play-by-play, player by player. Really, how much fun can it be to translate an Arabic technical manual or figure out the exact alloy used in a Chinese tank? Kind of fun, mostly a job.

Much of the reason the Defense Intelligence Agency wants to be near NGIC—and so is building a $61-million facility for 828 employees at Rivanna Station—is that the two groups regularly feed off each other. A DIA analyst might know a lot about, completely hypothetically, missile silos in Iran while the NGIC analyst knows a lot about, say, Iranian missiles. Why not get these crazy kids together? Mind you, DIA and NGIC aren’t the same—remember, NGIC deals just with foreign armies and reports to the U.S. Army, while DIA is directly under the Department of Defense and isn’t specific to one military branch. Still, there’s a lot of overlap. In fact, the five specific offices that are coming from DIA (including the “order of battle of military forces analysis office” and the “technical collection research and development office”) were chosen because of overlap with NGIC. Like NGIC, most DIA employees en route to Charlottesville are civilians, albeit civilians with top-secret security clearances. Of the 828 jobs that will relocate here, 500 are civilian, and the rest a split between military and on-site contractors. But being civilian doesn’t preclude deployment—DIA employees often end up doing stints in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Still interested, O Jobless Albemarle Citizen? Salivating over that 80 grand a year?

Don’t get carried away. Locals already with a top-secret clearance will be in terrific shape—but the rest of you will have to wait in line and jump through some hoops to get these jobs. According to a September survey, 77 percent of DIA employees slated for relocation said they would definitely or probably move. May is the final deadline for decisions, and DIA expects the number to increase. 

“We’re trying to do everything we can to encourage the employees that we already have,” said Donna Zibreg, a DIA senior HR manager, at a December 14 job fair, where around 85 of those few open DIA jobs were provisionally filled. “People who have already gone through the clearance process, people who have already been trained to do their jobs—we’re trying to do everything we can to get them to move.”

The survey indicates that those DIA employees with the lowest educational attainment are the most likely to relocate to Charlottesville, while those with advanced and terminal degrees are the most likely to stay in D.C.; 45 percent of the latter group said they were definitely or probably not moving. That’s good news for highly educated Charlottesville locals who need a job, but bad news for those without the big degrees. Never mind the security clearance.

Last week, there were two open jobs listed on DIA’s website that will end up at Rivanna Station—“intelligence officer” and “supervisory intelligence officer.” Indeed, the pay bands are high, starting at $89,000 and $124,000 respectively. Of course, to get the first job, you need to have “experience while deployed handling collection, processing and shipment of captured explosive ordnance and weapons systems and related components.” And as for the higher-paying job? You’re in luck if you have “experience conducting site exploitation including the recovery, exploitation and analysis of improvised explosive devices and improvised weapons systems in support of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations.”

Past that, DIA predicts that it will generate 643 “indirect” jobs, which basically means retail, food service, janitorial, child care, etc. Of course, those won’t come with $124K annually, but you’ll probably beat minimum wage. In the coming years, Citizen, there could be more jobs as part of the proverbial “contractor tail,” i.e., the hordes of private businesses that survive off DIA contracts. DIA has refused to speculate on the size of the contractor tail, but we do have the Parable of Booz Allen Hamilton, a joyful tale of growth and employment.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company that thrives on military contracts, opened its Charlottesville office, located in the UVA Research Park, in 2005 thanks to some NGIC contracts. Since then, it has gone from five employees to 70, and more than tripled the size of its office.

“We’re expecting that kind of growth path to continue, especially with DIA bringing so many opportunities to the area,” says Bob Furtado, a Booz Allen vice president. Booz Allen has so much work, in fact, that it subs specific tasks out to other local businesses, and Furtado expects eventually new local companies will spin off from the work done by Booz Allen and other defense contractors. “The growth that’s happening [in Charlottesville]—no one company can handle it by themselves.”

All those new employees in the Charlottesville office aren’t local, but Furtado says about half are. “The next two or three years, I can see us doubling our work force.”

Again, this is great—if you’re well educated and have experience in the field. “Most of our staff probably have a bachelor’s,” says Furtado. “I’d say a significant amount of them locally have a master’s degree as well.” But Booz Allen is working with community colleges and UVA. “You still work with the local community colleges that would feed a college or that will drive internships and stuff like that.”

Michael Harvey of TJPED understands that most of the new DIA jobs won’t go to locals. But he pins his hopes that workforce reeducation programs can help create a pipeline to these defense industry jobs.

“We kind of have this tsunami coming,” acknowledges Harvey, “but after that, you’ll really have the opportunity to fill those positions locally as we ramp up training and education programs here. People can change careers. And that’s ultimately what we want to see, is more of our local folks moving into those types of career paths.”

Taking credit

Many local politicians haven’t been shy about talking about the DIA as if they built that shiny new cumbersomely named facility with their bare hands.

Ken Boyd, the Albemarle County Supervisor running for Congress as a Republican, proclaims on his website that he “helped facilitate bringing over 1,000 high paying jobs to the district, despite opposition from anti-military Democrats.” Democrat David Slutzky, in his failed bid for reelection to the Board of Supervisors this fall, also took credit for helping “accommodate the relocation of Department of Defense jobs to Albemarle County.”

The thing is, neither Boyd nor Slutzky had that much to do with it. This wasn’t one of those back room deals where local leaders pleaded with a new business, bargaining with tax breaks and loan incentives. The DIA is coming because of a decision drawn up by the U.S. Secretary of Defense and ratified by U.S. Congress under a process known as Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), which happens every several years. Some bases are closed, some are expanded and some are created—all in an attempt to make the U.S. military more effective, cost and otherwise. The DIA relocation, part of the 2005 BRAC, is supposed to save about $10 million per year. 

Yet while local politicians had almost nothing to do with it, they did do something that looked to a lot of people like a back room deal. C-VILLE broke that story.

In the spring of 2006—many months after BRAC was ratified by Congress and signed off on by the President—Boyd got a tip that negotiations were breaking down between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of buying the land for the government, and local developer Wendell Wood. In 1999, Wood had sold the U.S. government 29 acres of land for NGIC at a price of $1 million. Seven years later, the government had $7 million to spend, but Wood thought his 47 acres of land the Corps wanted was worth at least double that. FOIA requests show that the Army appraised similar land at roughly $9.7 million, about 40 percent more than they wanted to spend.

Wood and the Army Corps of Engineers held a series of meetings with two supervisors at a time, in order to avoid the public record. At those meetings, they intimated that the DIA relocation might not happen without a deal—and that the existing NGIC jobs could go away as well.

So in order to help convince Wood to sell his land, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution of intent—which isn’t binding by law—to move 30 more acres of his Route 29 land into the growth area, thereby making that patch more valuable.

“It’s probably fair to say, after having done some significant research, that there wasn’t another way that I saw to be able to accommodate the NGIC expansion short of what we’re doing today,” said Slutzky at the time. “And for that reason I’m enthused about moving forward with it.”

Sally Thomas was the only supervisor who didn’t go along. She didn’t think it very likely that NGIC would pack up and go; moreover, she didn’t think it would be such a terrible blow if it did.

“I think that we are being held up by a landowner [Wood] who wouldn’t deal with the government on the terms that the government was offering,” Thomas said. “That was the federal government and so the county government is being asked to take an action to take the place of what otherwise would have been goodwill on the federal government’s part.”

Would Wood have sold the land to the government had the Board of Supervisors not intervened? He explained his position to C-VILLE in 2007: “You have to stand up for what you believe is right, and what’s good for the community and jobs.” And yet he would he have jeopardized NGIC’s presence in order to get $9 million or $10 million instead of $7 million?

Wood says he honestly doesn’t know what he would have done had the supervisors not agreed to move more of his land into the growth area. “I would hate to make that decision [at that time].” He says he had more lucrative offers on the table from a private developer. “Thank heavens—I think the county did the right thing,” Wood says, though he admits that if he hadn’t sold, “in hindsight, I would look back and say, ‘Damn, I should have sold it to them.’”

He thinks about it. “Let me put it this way. If I did not own any other land around NGIC, I absolutely would not have sold it to them.”

More importantly, would the federal government have taken its ball and gone home had Wood not sold? Just to switch the DIA relocation would have required scrapping months of work on the Albemarle site, selecting a new location, and amending BRAC, a process that would have had to go through the Pentagon, the BRAC committee and Congress. It would have been more arduous to relocate NGIC and abandon the $59 million facility that was just opened in 2001. Would that have been worth the extra few million that it would have taken to pay off Wood?

As a proper defense intelligence analyst might phrase it: The threat credibility was low.

For her part, Thomas, now retired from the Board of Supervisors, wants to shelve the feud. “This is sort of an old conversation, an old argument. Now [DIA employees] are coming, and it would be not very welcoming to have an article that says, ‘Hey, some people don’t want you to come.’ That’s not really what I would like our community to do. I think we should welcome them.”

Welcome them as we may, most of the DIA employees are coming from the D.C. area and, as Thomas says, “I’m sure individually they’ll each add something to our community, but when 700 or 800 new people move, and some of those are families, that impacts everything from traffic to school population, which in turn impacts the taxes of people who already live here.”

Supervisor Dennis Rooker lays out the basic math. “If somebody buys a $300,000 house, they pay about $2,200 in taxes in the county. If they have one child, that child costs the school system $11,400, about 70 percent of which is local. That doesn’t include police, fire, rescue, zoning services, social services, parks and rec, and all the others.”

Rooker, who fundamentally supports the DIA move because of national security, admits that analysis is overly simplistic—the new people will spend money, generating revenue in the form of sales taxes. And their presence will likely lead to commercial growth, with new stores that will themselves pay taxes. The final ledger will depend on exactly how many DIA employees come, how many buy houses, how much they spend at Albemarle stores and restaurants, and, in particular, how many bring children. About half of the DIA relocation survey respondents have at least one child. And those with children are slightly more likely to relocate than those without.

But no matter how you slice it, it’s not going to be a huge windfall for the coffers of Albemarle County.

Location, location, location

Still wondering where the profit is to be found in all this? Perhaps in the real estate market. A slew of local realtors have thrown up websites for DIA house hunters, such as ngic homes.com, ngichomes.org and ngicrealestate.com.

Gayle Harvey put up one such site—rivannastationhomes.com—as soon as she heard that the hordes were coming. “It’s a lot of exploration right now, and some are buying, but I wouldn’t say that it’s enough, from my standpoint, to say that it’s bringing back the local real estate market,” says Harvey, a realtor. “It’s not overwhelming.”

The survey of DIA employees suggests that two-thirds of the relocators plan on buying homes, and that Albemarle will be their first choice, while Greene and Charlottesville come next. They want good schools, good jobs for their spouse, and a quick commute.

Scott Kirkpatrick, deputy for DIA’s office of science and technology, was one of the first to relocate. In October, his wife and he bought behind the Carrsbrook subdivision, off 29 North, only six miles from work.

“We always liked Charlottesville, we’ve been down here several times visiting Monticello and taking drives to the wineries,” says Kirkpatrick. “So when the opportunity came that our office might be moving, we made the decision to look at that. Found a realtor, looked at the websites, and it was really pretty easy, pretty painless.”

Neighbors like the Kirkpatricks will surely be an asset to Carrsbrook. Some houses will sell more quickly and fetch a higher price than they would otherwise, enriching the seller and perhaps increasing surrounding property values. Still, those benefits are a little intangible, considering the benefit bonanza that DIA is hyped to bring.

The real estate angle of the DIA relocation has made money for at least one person in Albemarle County, and it’s likely to pay off a lot more. Wendell Wood—who else?—has already built 110,000 square feet of office space adjacent to NGIC, much of which he’s leasing to the military. And if he gets those 30 acres added to the growth area, as county supervisors promised in 2006, he’ll be able to build much more like it for the military and military contractors.

Wood is hardly the only one hoping to cash in. A drive up 29 North from Wal-mart into Greene County is replete with roadside advertisements for available land. Many of them are for United Land Corporation, Wood’s baby. But not all of them. The Fried Companies have a huge hunk of already cleared land in Greene County just across the Albemarle line, and the DIA relocation could jumpstart development there. The first section of North Pointe, a 269-acre residential and commercial mega-development rezoned in 2006, is just south of NGIC and in the process of coming online with 187 townhomes.

“This property is ideally located for NGIC and also for the [UVA] research park which is directly across the street,” that portion’s developer, Richard Spurzem, told C-VILLE in June. “…Even if the economy isn’t any better, it’s still one of the best located pieces of property.”

One prize, however, is available exclusively to Wood: future land sales to DIA or NGIC. Wood owns 958 acres surrounding NGIC under the moniker Next Generation LLC, almost all of which is contiguous. If the U.S. military wants to expand on site, it will have to buy from Wood. If any of that land is added to the growth area, Wood can likely fetch a higher price.

The Board of Supervisors has now taken up the topic, and it’s unclear what will happen. At a work session on January 13, Rooker and Ann Mallek appeared skeptical of expansion, while Ken Boyd and Rodney Thomas seemed more open to it. Some supervisors find it more palatable to expand the growth area now because of what happened with Biscuit Run. What was to be the area’s largest development, with 3,100 housing units on roughly 800 acres on the southern side of Charlottesville, will instead become a state park. 

Newly elected supervisor Duane Snow says we should maintain 5 percent as growth area. “Right now, it’s below that with the loss of Biscuit Run. So if we look at adding some additional areas to compensate for that, I think that’s great.”

Rooker, on the other hand, wonders if we need more land in the growth area. Albemarle County has more than 5,000 housing units in the pipeline along 29 North, according to a Piedmont Environmental Council report, and more than 2 million square feet of unbuilt commercial space. Sally Thomas says that there are about 14 square miles of vacant land inside the existing development area—four more square miles than the City of Charlottesville.

Supervisors are also concerned that expanding the growth area around NGIC will end up hampering its future expansion—and eventually force them to leave. “It wouldn’t help us to box them in,” said Supervisor Ann Mallek at the work session. “We should think about protecting future expansion of this facility.”

Wood scoffs at the notion that he would hem the military in. “Do you really think I’m that stupid?” He says he’s turned down roughly 10 offers from other businesses that want to be near NGIC and DIA. “I take their needs into consideration.”

“People across the country would die to have the opportunity that we have before us in this county,” Wood says. “And here we crap on them and don’t welcome them. Sometimes life is too good.”

Comparing acronyms: Is DIA more like GE or UVA?

Wendell Wood likes to say that NGIC and the University of Virginia “are the greatest things to ever happen to this community.”

But is the military intelligence industry in Charlottesville more like UVA—or more like the other businesses that have come and flourished and promised and crumbled? Crozet was once home to the county’s largest industrial employer, with 1,600 employees at its height, churning out hundreds of thousands of pot pies a day for Morton’s Foods. It was bought and traded a half dozen times, until finally, under Del Monte ownership, it shut down for good in 2000.

Just across the road from NGIC is another business that bought its land from Wendell Wood. GE consolidated its Albemarle presence in the late 1970s at a sparkling new factory off 29 North, and employed at its height 1,200 locally. In 1981, the Daily Progress ran a feature on GE’s Albemarle facility, which made equipment for factories.

“Charlottesville will one day be the driving force for the factory of the future and for electric cars,” said Guido DiGregorio, general manager of the company’s industrial control department. He predicted that the 29 North facility would boast 2,000 employees, and that by 1985, GE in Charlottesville would be recognized as the major supplier of controls for electric cars.

Events did not exactly play out as DiGregorio predicted. 

This isn’t to say that GE maliciously tried to hoodwink Albemarle residents. But businessmen are usually pretty bullish on their own businesses —and we ought not get too carried away with their rosy visions of their own future. Today, GE employs about 500 local workers. No one talks of Charlottesville as the seat of the electric car controls.

So is NGIC-DIA more like GE or UVA?

Clearly, the U.S. military is a different beast from private business. It follows the cycles of government and war rather than the cycles of the U.S. markets. Dennis Rooker points out that DIA won’t ever relocate to Mexico. In that sense, it is more like UVA than GE.

But military intelligence isn’t likely to improve our quality of life in the way UVA does. It won’t have a repertory theater or beautiful public buildings or a world-class library accessible to all. It won’t provide anything accessible to all. In that sense, it is not much different than a GE.

With the DIA relocation, some people will clearly win: a few locals who successfully switch careers; qualified UVA students who want to stick around after graduation; engineers and analysts who want to resettle near an idyllic college town; the UVA research park and University employees who teach classes needed for military intelligence; developers with land near NGIC—most especially Wendell Wood and his heirs, who stand to keep selling land to the U.S. government as long as Rivanna Station keeps needing it.

For most of us, however, it’s a mixed bag. There will probably be a few new restaurants around Hollymead. A nice new couple could move in next door. Traffic will pick up even more on 29 North, and the northern Albemarle schools could fill up faster. Services from the county will likely decline unless taxes go up. For some, that trade-off will be worthwhile; others will grumble.

Perhaps, Citizen, just perhaps, you can imagine what your new community will be like. It will be like it is. Just a little bigger.

Welcome your new neighbors. But regardless what business leaders or DP editorials say, don’t feel like you have to worship them.