136th Year... and still on the job!	Saturday July 23, 2005

Senators move to lift cost caps on 2 projects for chem demil

While Defense Department officials were receiving a scaled-down proposal for how chemical weapons will be destroyed at two Army bases Friday, senators from the two states affected were working to remove the cost caps that forced those revisions.

On Friday, Mike Parker, program manager for the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives agency overseeing weapons destruction programs at the Pueblo Chemical Depot and Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot, met with Undersecretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg.

Friday was the deadline for the ACWA program to submit a revised plan for weapons destruction that would meet a Defense Department cost cap, $1.7 billion for the life cycle of the Pueblo operation.

The new plan was developed by prime contractor Bechtel after the Defense Department last year stopped all work on the Pueblo and Blue Grass projects. Cost estimates for the Pueblo project had grown to $2.6 billion after Bechtel followed the department's own instructions to accelerate the process in the interests of national security.

Meanwhile, Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced an amendment to the 2006 Defense Authorization bill that requires the Department of Defense to come up with a new estimate of the life-cycle cost for the destruction of chemical weapons and cleanup at the Pueblo Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Depot in Kentucky.

“The purpose of this amendment is to replace the outdated, inaccurate life-cycle cost estimate with a new estimate that more accurately reflects the cost of ensuring the destruction of the chemical weapons stored at these two depots,” Allard said in introducing the amendment.

“The revised and updated life-cycle estimate we are requiring would be based on 60 percent of the design work and would include the increased costs of construction and materials, as well as savings from the design effort currently under way,” he said. “This will provide Congress and the communities involved with a more realistic estimate of what these projects will cost to complete.” That 60 percent design work is what Bechtel had completed by last fall when work was stopped.

Allard indicated that the amendment would remove the grounds for last year's work stoppage when the Pentagon claimed that the $12.7 billion cost it had certified to Congress couldn't be exceeded.

He said that that led to the imposition of an artificial spending cap that hindered the program manager and the local community from considering options that would ensure the safety of workers at the two facilities and increase the likelihood that destruction of the weapons at the two bases would be completed by the 2012 Chemical Weapons Convention treaty deadline.

“The new cost estimate will allow the program manager and the people of Pueblo and Blue Grass to better determine the most efficient, rapid and safe, method for cleaning up these chemical weapons sites,” Allard said.

Local groups monitoring the project were waiting for word on what the scaled down plan would include. The Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Community Advisory Commission urged Parker not to send the treated agent hydrolysate, the hazardous material left over from the water neutralization process, off site and to consider also treatment of the explosives stored with the mustard agent weapons on site.

ACWA officials would not comment what Parker's recommendations were and referred all questions to the Defense Department. A spokeswoman there said, "While we can't comment on the details of an internal meeting, our understanding is that it was a very productive exchange of information.

"The Department and its ACWA program continue to make excellent progress in right sizing the Pueblo and Blue Grass facilities and more information will be made available as decisions are made concerning these important projects."