Budget aids plan to destroy weapons

By James R. Carroll
jcarroll@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

WASHINGTON -- A year ago, Kentucky lawmakers and community groups turned back the Pentagon's plan to delay work on a plant to destroy chemical weapons at the Blue Grass Army Depot.

Last week, the Bush administration put the plant back on track, proposing $175 million for the Kentucky facility in the fiscal 2007 budget.

The money is part of an additional $317 million in the budget for the depot and a similar site in Pueblo, Colo.

If Congress goes along with the budget request, "they'll be pouring concrete in '07," said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a community organization based in Berea, Ky.

Jim Fritsche, the government's site project manager at Blue Grass, agreed with that timetable. He said that by later this year work will be under way on an access road, security checkpoints and earthworks, and construction on the building where the 523 tons of weapons will be destroyed is scheduled to start in March or April of next year.

"Today we took some contractors out to the site," Fritsche said Thursday.

He said full operations would begin in 2011 and last about 2½ years, at which time the weapons stockpile would be gone.

The chemicals include the deadly nerve agents sarin and VX. Under international treaty, the United States is supposed to destroy all of its chemical weapons by 2012.

Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recommended in an August letter to the Department of Defense that it request between $300 million and $400 million for the program that will oversee the weapons destruction work in Kentucky and Colorado.

"I am pleased to see the Department of Defense took my advice and included sufficient funding," McConnell, a member of the Appropriations Committee and its defense subcommittee, said in a statement last week. But he added, "This is only the first step in the budget process."

Williams said he was confident most of the funding would survive. "We're out of the gate," he said.

McConnell's request to the administration followed confrontations with the Pentagon earlier last year over the military's plan to suspend design work at Blue Grass and Pueblo in favor of other priorities. Bush's budget last year asked for only $33 million for the Kentucky and Colorado sites.

McConnell; Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky.; Democratic Rep. Ben Chandler of Kentucky's 6th District; and Colorado's senators and House members, plus Williams, all criticized the Pentagon for breaking its commitments at the two sites, and military officials ultimately backed down.

McConnell also wrote a provision in a supplemental spending bill last year requiring the Pentagon to spend money from earlier years budgeted for Blue Grass and Pueblo at those sites and not at any others.

And he directed the Defense Department to speed up spending for the two sites and barred the agency from studying the feasibility of moving the weapons elsewhere.

Reporter James R. Carroll can be reached at (202) 906-8141.