Residents of a suburban Washington community celebrated the dedication of a new fence surrounding the Suitland Federal Center in Maryland Tuesday, while employees continued to hope that longstanding health and safety problems at the buildings inside the fence would soon be resolved.
A group of federal officials, including Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., dedicated the new brick and wrought-iron fence, which replaces an aging barbed-wire fence that locals complained made the neighborhood look run-down and unsafe.
But employees of the Census Bureau, which is housed on the aging Suitland campus in Prince George's County, Md., initially dismissed the $1.1 million fence as an example of misplaced priorities. At the center, leaky pipes cause regular indoor flooding and electrical outages. In addition, Census employees can't drink the water from their office faucets because traces of lead, copper and coliform bacteria have been found in the building's water supply.
In conjunction with the fence dedication, the General Services Administration, which serves as the facility's landlord, held a meeting about conditions within the buildings that gave employees reason to hope, said Avis Buchanan, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 2782, which represents about 4,000 Census employees at Suitland.
GSA's fiscal 2000 appropriations measure ordered the agency to do a study detailing the safety and health problems faced by Census employees and to develop a plan for modernizing facilities. That study was released Tuesday, and plans are underway to take care of the problems, Buchanan said. But GSA has yet to decide whether Census will get a new building or simply a renovation of facilities at the Suitland site.
"Sen. Mikulski has been the lead on this. When we invited her to come in and see what's happening inside the building, she agreed to work with us to meet our needs," Buchanan said.
Completing the renovations or building a new facility could take until 2006, Buchanan said.
Suitland's problems are shared by other federal building occupants nationwide. The General Accounting Office has estimated that the cost of repairing all of the decaying properties in the government's $300 billion real estate portfolio would be in the tens of billions of dollars.
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