Military base cleanup: contractors beware.

• Author: Gifford, John
• Position: VIEW POINT

The Defense Department has estimated it will spend $7.3 billion for environmental activities at bases that are scheduled to be closed. But these costs are likely to continue to increase.

The 2005 Base Closing and Realignment Commission predicted that additional environmental restoration costs for the Pentagon's 33 major proposed closings will cost another nearly half billion dollars.

The environmental requirements for realigning and closing military installations include restoration activities, National Environmental Policy Act property re-use and transfer documentation, and cultural and natural resource considerations.

To deal with the environmental requirements related to closing any military installation, it is critical to take an inventory of the specific issues affecting that particular location. In the past, this due-diligence approach often has not been used, which led to assumptions and incomplete information that yielded important--and expensive--omissions in the initial environmental cleanup process.

For example, most organizations tend to focus on unexploded ordnance when addressing the closing of a military installation. While this is an important consideration, other problems tend to be overlooked, such as asbestos or contaminated groundwater.

In previous BRAC closings, lessons have been learned the hard way. Tom Nielsen, president of ESI Energy Systems and a past BRAC task force member, says that several closings in California during the 1990s suffered from environmental shortsightedness. Citizen interest groups didn't realize that the property they were receiving would have some important, long-term environmental issues to address.

"They expected this pristine property," said Nielsen. "Everyone wanted to start populating the property with businesses and houses." But, between inadequate environmental cleanup and unrealistic expectations, these properties "were an economic non-starter," he said. "This has created an anecdotal view that military properties are too hard to use," added Nielsen. "It gave people the wrong idea."

When government, military and civilian entities do their homework at the beginning of the process, they can save valuable time and resources as key information is discovered, shared and studied before the actual work begins.

This base-closing environmental preparation, or homework, can be broken down into three key principles:

Don't reinvent the wheel. Find what has already been done in terms of...