Proposed federal spending cuts for the Department of Homeland Security could delay the redevelopment of St. Elizabeths Hospital and the department’s planned headquarters move to Anacostia in 2017. An appropriations bill proposing $1 billion in cuts, including slashing all 2012 construction funding for the new DHS headquarters at St. Elizabeths, passed the House last week.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said delays in funding related to the 2011 cuts have already cost taxpayers $69 million. That’s because original plans called for parts of the DHS headquarters to be built in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard building, which is nearly halfway complete.
| St. Elizabeths infamous patient stays put | ||
| St. Elizabeths Hospital’s abandoned buildings and dark past may be meeting a bulldozer soon, but that doesn’t mean the patients are getting booted out. Order one in the campus’ massive redevelopment included a new mental hospital that opened in May 2010 on the eastern edge of campus near the Congress Heights Metro station. That means the hospital’s most famous patient, would-be President Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., remains in D.C. after nearly three decades. | ||
| 1982 | Hinckley confined to St. Elizabeths. | |
| 1999 | Allowed to leave the hospital for supervised visits with his parents. | |
| 2000 | Allowed unsupervised visits with family, but privilege soon revoked. | |
| 2005 | Off-grounds visits reinstated. | |
| 2011 | Forensic psychologist testifies Hinckley “poses no imminent risk of danger to himself or others.” | |
“This is not a project you can break up into pieces — you can’t stop midway through it,” Norton said of the biggest defense construction project since the Pentagon.
The District has said it plans to forge ahead with phase I on its side of the St. Elizabeths redevelopment, which has $17 million in city funding through 2013. But the rest of the planned residences, retail and office space could depend on how and when the federal government ponies up for its side of the project, which also includes a headquarters building for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“Our pursuit of future east campus phases may correlate to the federal government’s timing on future developments of the west campus site,” said Jose Sousa, spokesman for the deputy mayor for planning and economic development.
He added the remainder of private development will be leveraged to pay for the rest of the phases.
Observers have said the appropriations bill is not expected to pass the Senate. Norton said that chamber has been more favorable to the DHS project, noting the Senate first approved the funding for construction.
“We don’t have any assurances about what the Senate will do, but we know they understand this project [cut] is quite different than the cuts you see occurring through these bills,” she said.
The Coast Guard’s 3,850 employees are still scheduled to move to the campus in 2013. The District has scheduled a public meeting for June 30 to unveil new proposals for phase I. The city’s original concept included a technology and innovation center at the historic Maple Campus quadrangle and new office buildings with retail along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.
