By SHELBY G. SPIRES
Times Aerospace Writer
shelbys@htimes.com
The Army plans to lease sections of land on Redstone Arsenal to commercial real estate developers to build office space, a conference center and classrooms, Army officials said Thursday.
The development plan could eventually result in the arsenal's north fence being moved back, placing the post golf course and club outside restricted areas, officials said.
The plan, which the Army calls Enhanced Use Lease, will set aside about 422 acres on the north side of the base along Rideout Road near Gate 9 for 50-year leases, said Joe Davis, chief of Redstone's master planning division.
The development would help ease the traffic at Redstone's main gates because conferences, university classes and other nonclassified meetings could be held in the buildings just off the base.
Davis said the Army should choose a developer by early 2007, "and if that company has done some design work already, it should take about a year or 15 months" to finish most of the construction, depending on the size of the project.
"When the fence is moved is something that has yet to be determined," he said. "That whole area by Rideout Road is a viable commercial property because of its location near I-565 and Cummings Research Park."
Some of the proposed office space "would remain on the Redstone side of the fence," Davis said. "All the buildings will have to be built to our security standards." Those include a requirement that sites have limited parking near a building.
Davis said moving the fence line behind the Redstone golf course and the club would make those facilities more accessible to retirees and others.
"Also, some areas near the golf course could be developed for other commercial uses" under the plan, he said.
The Army would benefit from the commercial development, he said, but not through cash payments. Those, he said, "would have to be turned directly over to the U.S. Treasury, and Redstone wouldn't receive that much of it back" except through tradeoffs.
An example, Davis said, would be "if $1 million in rent was owed to the Army, then that company could pay for $1 million in work or services." One of the first such tradeoffs would be for a company to pay for the fence to be set back, he said.
The land use plan originally was aimed at giving the Army an opportunity to reuse older buildings on the outskirts of an Army post by turning them over to private companies instead of tearing them down. That evolved into the current plan to use vacant land, Davis said.
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