Feds to shift jobs this way

The Charlottesville area is about to get an economic shot in the arm courtesy of the federal government, which decided to move some defense and intelligence operations southwest from Northern Virginia by roughly 100 miles.
In short, the Washington area’s loss of approximately 1,000 defense-related jobs is Albemarle County’s gain.
This week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a contract to a Chicago firm to design and build a facility on U.S. 29 less than 10 miles north of Charlottesville.
The design-build contract is worth $58.5 million with an additional option, worth almost $2.5 million, to design and build a new entrance and visitor control center for Rivanna Station, where the new facility will be built on 46 acres next to the National Ground Intelligence Center.
Archer Western Contractors of Chicago gained the contract April 1 to build the Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility on the 46-acre site.
In defense lingo, that means Archer Western is building JUIAF next to the Army’s NGIC to house analytical functions of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and the NGIC.
These somewhat unfamiliar acronymns will be a tad north and across U.S. 29 from CHO, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport.
In practical terms, that means a facility is being built for a designed occupancy of 1,000 people with parking for 625 vehicles.
Archer Western has two years to design and build the facility, which means the Charlottesville area is getting a Christmas present of at least 1,000 people in well-paying jobs in 2010.
The contract calls for between 168,000 and 170,500 gross square feet in a building that will house intelligence analysts whose job it is to protect our country.
These will be largely white-collar, information-age jobs with good salaries and benefits.
The Department of Defense estimates that this Base Realignment and Closure action will bring a total of 1,500 additional long-term jobs to the Charlottesville area.
The new jobs will be both in the direct additional government and defense contractor workforce housed at JUIAF and in indirect workforce, such as the service industry, generated as a byproduct.
The University of Virginia, which is the area’s largest employer, creates many jobs of this caliber and provides a strong element of stability to the Charlottesville area’s economy.
The new federal jobs will buttress that stability and add strength to the area’s economy, which will help the region weather economic cloudiness, dips and hard times.
Many areas of Virginia would love to have the jobs coming to Albemarle, but they are coming here for good reasons.
Some of those reasons have to do with our location, the proximity to Washington and the strength of the area’s institutions and workforce.
Everyone in the area’s economy, whether they sell pizza or bagels or caps and gowns, can welcome the rising tide of defense and intelligence jobs that will lift all boats.