DSB Says BRAC Cleanup Underfunded

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>]

BRAC CLEANUP UNDERFUNDED

There's bad news for communities with closing military bases 
buried in the recent (April 22, 1995) report of the Defense Science 
Board (DSB) Task Force on Environmental Security. Even though 
Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) cleanup funding has 
escaped the knife in recent Congressional budget action, there still 
is not enough money in the pipeline.

The task force (p. ES-8) finds:

"Base Realignments and Closure (BRAC) environmental 
requirements are of particular concern. In most cases, land cannot 
be transferred to local entities until cleanup has occurred. Yet 
BRAC funding is clearly insufficient. The DoD is not now able to 
meet all of its BRAC-91 environmental funding requirements and 
the environmental funding for the most recent round of proposed 
closures (BRAC-95) is not included in current DoD plans and 
budgets. Even if the total budget can be kept stable, it may not be 
possible to fund all BRAC work in a timely fashion...."

At the June 7 meeting of the Federal Facilities Environmental 
Restoration Dialogue Committee, I asked Sherri Wasserman 
Goodman, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for 
Environmental Security, about this DSB finding. She would not 
confirm it, but some of my sources in the armed services say that 
it's true.

As far as I know, the word - that BRAC is underfunded - has not 
gotten out.

Lenny Siegel