136th Year... and still on the job!	Wednesday July 27, 2005

Panel waits to hear chem demil plan

The Colorado citizens' panel overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons here could find out tonight just how much of the work might be done in Pueblo.

As of Tuesday, many members of the Colorado Chemical Weapons Citizens’ Advisory Commission still were in the dark as to how many of their recommendations are part of a plan passed on to the Defense Department.

Last Friday, Mike Parker, program manager for the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program that will manage projects at the Pueblo Chemical Depot and Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot, met with Under Secretary of Defense Kenneth Krieg and presented a scaled-down plan for the projects that will keep them within the life-cycle budgets the Pentagon originally set.

Neither the ACWA office nor the Pentagon would comment on the details of the plan.

The designs for both locations were exceeding their original budgets. The cost increases stemmed from an order from a predecessor of Krieg's to accelerate the work in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but the Defense Defense Department decided last year it didn't want to pay the price.

The Pentagon froze design work last fall when its budget people saw how the costs were rising. Pueblo's project was supposed to cost $1.7 billion and the cost had risen to $2.6 billion.

Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have introduced an amendment to a military spending bill lifting the caps, but for now the ACWA managers have to work within them.

Prime contractor Bechtel has developed a revised plan to keep the work within the original budget. However, the Colorado citizens' group has recommended against several parts of Bechtel's new plan, namely that the hydrolysate, what's left after the 2,611 tons of mustard agent is neutralized in water, be processed on site. That means shipping millions of gallons of hydrolysate, a hazardous material, in tankers from Pueblo to some other state.

The commission recommended that Bechtel's original plan to recycle the water on site remain in the proposal.

The commission also questioned Bechtel's proposal that explosive materials, the propellants stored alongside the weapons and the fuses and bursters that have to be removed from the weapons, would be shipped out, too.

Bill Pehlivanian, ACWA deputy project manager, is expected to attend tonight's meeting of the commission.

The meeting will be at 6 p.m. at the Pueblo Convention Center.