The State Department appeared to put the final nail in the coffin this week on Georgia’s years-long bid to host an embassy security training facility in Glynco, a move that angered some GOP members of the state’s congressional delegation.
Two Senate aides said the State Department alerted lawmakers of its plans to move forward with tree clearing at the site of the estimated $416 million training center at Fort Pickett in southern Virginia. By the time it’s completed in 2019, the facility is expected to host 8,000 to 10,000 students annually.
Georgia Republicans for years pushed for the facility to be located at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center near Brunswick, which sparked a turf battle with Virginia lawmakers. Several Peach State lawmakers slammed the news on Thursday.
Pooler Republican Rep. Buddy Carter, whose district is home to Glynco, called the decision to break ground in Virginia a “slap in the face to American taxpayers.”
Georgia’s two U.S. senators, meanwhile, questioned the State Department’s process for selecting new projects. Both men sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vowed to use their positions to further scrutinize the department’s decision-making.
The experience with the Glynco facility “demonstrated how the federal government’s decision-making process is based more on expediency rather than on a fulsome cost-benefit analysis,” U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson said.
U.S. Sen. David Perdue, the chairman of a Senate subcommittee that directly oversees the State Department, indicated that lawmakers should have been informed earlier in the process about the government’s constraints related to how close the facility should be to a Marine Corps facility. Marines serve as guards at U.S. embassies.
“Clearly, there are systemic problems at the State Department, and I’m concerned other capital projects could encounter the same obstacles,” he said.
The news was first reported by The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Glynco’s boosters in Congress are still looking for avenues to fight the decision to locate the project in Virginia, but they conceded there are several factors stacked against them, a House GOP aide said.
Congress for years blocked money for the facility in annual spending bills, but the government funding deal signed into law in December includes up to $99.1 million for the project, the same amount the Obama administration wanted to break ground.
The State Department for more than two decades has sought to consolidate its security training for the agents tasked with guarding American embassies and other diplomatic missions worldwide into one location. The government currently conducts “hard skills” training, including instruction dealing with firearms, explosives and high-speed driving, at nearly a dozen facilities nationwide.
The government considered sites in Georgia, West Virginia and other areas in the capital region for the training facility before the administration settled on a site adjacent to the Army National Guard base at Fort Pickett, outside Petersburg, Va. The State Department said it was geographically convenient to Washington, more cost-effective and better met the government’s needs.
The announcement sparked years of back-and-forth in Congress that at times included Georgia and Virginia lawmakers, committee chairmen and several federal agencies, at times involving contradicting reports, price estimates and questions about the opaqueness of the overall decision-making process. Some Virginia lawmakers accused the Georgia delegation of delaying the project.
Glynco’s boosters said retrofitting that facility was significantly cheaper than the Virginia site given the pre-existing infrastructure, a claim proponents of the Virginia site said was inaccurate when looking at the costs over time.
“As four different federal agency evaluations and an independent cost-benefit analysis made clear, only Fort Pickett meets every requirement for a consolidated (training facility) making it by far the best site — both from a strategic and cost perspective,” Virginia’s governor and most of its congressional delegation said Thursday in a joint statement celebrating the news.
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