Posted on 06/27/2007 7:55:17 AM PDT by RDTF
At the request of most members of the New Jersey Congressional delegation, the Government Accountability Office says it will look into whether faulty cost and savings estimates played a role in the 2005 decision to close Fort Monmouth by 2011.
Henry L. Hinton, a managing director for the agency, confirmed on Tuesday that the agency was embarking on a review of the Defense Department’s estimates and how they have since changed. The 90-year-old Army post, which has not yet begun to be shut down, employs 5,000, generates $3.3 billion annually and supports 22,000 additional jobs in the state.
In addition, the delegation has asked the Defense Department’s inspector general to investigate the decision to close the base. Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the inspector general, said that no decision on how or whether to proceed had yet been made.
The spokesmen for both the accountability office and the Defense Department’s inspector general said that requests for investigations into such fundamental operations of the closing process were unusual.
The decision to investigate the base closing was reported on Tuesday by The Asbury Park Press. The newspaper had previously reported that the Defense Department’s estimates of the cost of decommissioning and moving current functions at the base had nearly doubled, to $1.5 billion from $780 million, in the two years since the Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted to close the base.
-snip-
“It is evident that faulty assumptions based upon flawed data led to a damaging decision for the military and the people of New Jersey,” New Jersey’s two senators, Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, wrote in the letter requesting the review by the accountability office. “The decision to close the base should be re-examined.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Lautenberg and Menendez are basically saying that they don’t care if the base wastes taxpayer money, as long as some government jobs stay in New Jersey.
That would be a neat trick.
Plenty of Bell Labs employees relocated.
Whether they are willing to relocate or not is a moot point: where are the local engineering jobs they would take instead? If they existed, I doubt these people would be working for federal wages instead.
They don't want to move - but they don't have much of a choice.
““It is evident that faulty assumptions based upon flawed data led to a damaging decision for the military and the people of New Jersey,” New Jersey’s two senators”
I could care less what the impact is on the good people of New Jersey.
Military bases exist to defend the United States, not as jobs programs for politicians.
Mostly they want to keep it open to keep using the Golf Course.
AT&T, Cisco
Balanced budget in New Jersey — in your dreams.
Fort Monmouth should have been closed in 1990 and Fort Devens should have remained open. They got the whole thing backwards.
I was stationed at both. I agree with you.
I was stationed at Ft. Monmouth for a while right after I came back from Vietnam. What a piece of sh*t posting. The locals were more hostile to GI’s than the good people of Can Tho.
The military NEEDS to close facilities to use the money for other activities; wew weapons development, modernization, repairs, consolitation, etc. These communities (including the one I live in) just don’t get it. The military lives on a fixed budget. If they want something they have to give up something else. It’s not liberalland where they can just spend without worrying where it comes from. They are doing what provate sectors managers do. Fit what is needed into a budget.
Hahahaha, I knew you’d be in agreement when I saw you tag line. Yes, I frequently drive past the Quad at Devens and it is a damn shame. Had we had just one squared away senator, they would have closed Natick, relocated it to Devens along with the necessary functions of the Watertown Arsenal and some real cost savings would have been accomplished along with saving New England’s sole army base.
In 65 & 66 when I was there, the local college students spent more time outside the Forts fence protesting than they did in class.
Interesting observation; was it really that bad?
"ASA LIVES, CEWI SUCKS"
Upset a few folks.
It was worse. As far as I am concerned NY and NJ are garbage. I was stationed there for change of MOS training after I was discharged from Letterman Hospital. It was in transit through NYC that I was spit on outside the Transit Authority while in uniform. I was refused service in a small club near by because I was in uniform. I later had a tip I left thrown at me by a waiter who felt that a 25 cent tip in a $1.75 beer was an insult less than 10 miles from the main gate while in uniform.
Wow. Ayer/Shirley were generally pretty hospitable to everybody. They were the only Army towns I’ve been stationed at that did not look like it (aka, no strip clubs, no xxx joints, no pawn shops, no tatoo parlors, etc.). As I understand it, FDMA was one of the few forts the army could ship back the black GI’s who’d married Germans to...at least in the fifties and sixties. There are still quite a few of those families left in the area. All in all, the fort was in a good area..it still is.
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