Home » Archives » "$32 million facility only the beginning"

$32 million facility only the beginning

Oct-20-2004 » Filed Under: General Military

[Link to Full Article]
MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

The flow of federal construction dollars isn’t slowing at Fort Lewis even though the two new Stryker brigades – the post’s highest priorities the past four years – are finished products.

Officials who gathered Tuesday for a ribbon-cutting at a new $32 million strategic deployment facility said there’s more than $585 million worth of projects in the pipeline over the next four years.

“That’s as big a number here as I can remember,” said U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Belfair), who’s been in Congress since 1977. He has a hand in most of the money that reaches the local post.

Dicks said Madigan Army Medical Center cost about $300 million in the 1980s, “but there’s never been anything like this, this sustained.”

The new deployment facility consists of more than six buildings and 30,000 square feet of covered space. It features a fenced staging area with room for 600 vehicles, eight new railway offshoots called spurs, new ramps, two new paved lots with room for 300 to 400 cargo containers and a warehouse big enough to hold 400 pallets of cargo.

The added facilities led to an increase of the workforce by about 25, to a total of 130 civilian Army employees, said Ron Trow of the post’s joint transportation directorate.


Advertisements