Facing the Future at Fort Bragg

Efforts at North Carolina base will help develop national model standards

By E. Michael Powers

A $1 billion capital improvement program to expand and modernize Fort Bragg and its sister installation, Pope Air Force Base, both in North Carolina, will help produce national standards for the design of all Army buildings. The Savannah District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is running the ambitious program.

The bases, which house the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Operations Forces, are being renovated partly because of outdated facilities and partly because of the Army's reorganization.

"The average age of the barracks was 62 years old," said Ken Gray, Fort Bragg area engineer for the corps. "We've been working to replace the barracks for the last five years." The current target date for complete replacement, at a cost of $1 billion, is 2009, he said.

After the program to renovate the barracks was announced, the Army made the decision to redeploy troops out of foreign installations and to restructure its brigades into brigade combat teams. Under the restructuring program, the corps needed to add new command facilities to Fort Bragg to get the base up to specifications.

The corps program includes projects ranging from the $10 million design-build renovation of Kennedy Hall, home to the special operations unit, to the $175 million 4th Brigade Combat Team Complex.

BL Harbert International of Birmingham, Ala., utilized design-build for the recently completed $42 million barracks complex for the 16th military police while ACC Construction of Augusta, Ga., is working on phases one and two of the 3rd Brigade Barracks Complex under an $84 million contract.

At Pope AFB, the Savannah district has recently managed $20 million in airfield repairs along with a new $13.5 million combat control school for the soldiers who secure forward airfields and prep them for arrival of airborne reinforcements.

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Though the barracks program is scheduled to wrap up in 2009, Base Realignment and Closure projects will start up in the same year at Fort Bragg, which is expected to inherit between 6,000 and 20,000 troops under the latest BRAC plan. As a result, the Corps of Engineers will be spending $300 million on a new facility to house FORCOM, the Army's largest command, when it relocates from Fort McPherson, Ga.

While the bulk of the BRAC work will not kick off until 2009, some initial projects will soon be under way. The corps will be letting a $52 million vehicle maintenance facility project next year as the first BRAC project to hit the ground at Fort Bragg.

Pushing Design-Build

The program that the Savannah district has been running at Fort Bragg and Pope AFB has been more than a standard capital improvement program. It has been on the forefront of the corps transition towards more extensive use of design-build contracting.

"Five years ago, almost all of the projects were designed by the corps then bid and built," Gray said. "This coming year, almost all of our projects will be design-build."

The change in delivery has not escaped the notice of the contractors.

"Over the last three or four years, the corps has phased in design-build," said Chuck Haag, project manager for Pittsburgh-based Sauer Inc., an active contractor at the bases. "There were only a few design-build jobs being awarded in the past, and now it seems like one third of the jobs being awarded are design-build. They are constantly tweaking and honing their delivery systems."

The main driver behind this change has been the need for faster delivery.

"In the old cycle, we would start the design two years before the funding came," Gray said. The corps now is delivering many of its projects in little over two years from award to commission.

At one point the district office was tasked with delivering a new brigade combat team area in 10 months. Delivering the $114 million project in so little time was challenging, Gray said.

The project encompassed 63 24-man barracks, 30 company operations facilities, six battalion headquarters and one brigade headquarters.

"The only way we could deliver it was to use modular construction," Gray added. "The barracks were essentially prefabricated offsite and hauled to the location."

The prefabricated barracks are not to be confused with temporary structures. "The corps is looking for permanent modular solutions, where you don't realize that it's a modular design," said Ben Patrick, vice president with BL Harbert International.

In addition to speeding the construction process, modular construction provides relief in the face of widespread labor shortages. "We are looking closely at modular construction in design to help mitigate the lack of labor," Patrick said.

The corps is expanding its delivery repertoire beyond modular designs and design-build contracts. A major tweak to the delivery system is the new RFP (request for proposals) formats.

"We are transforming the RFP," Gray said. "We are being less proscriptive on contract requirements and allowing the contractors to be more innovative. We are trying to get a better product by including more contractor innovation in the process."

The most prominent change is allowing contractors to build based on commercial codes rather than corps specifications.

"The corps used to preclude the use of wood framing; now they allow it. It's a fairly dramatic change," Patrick said.

The corps also has overhauled its approach to timetables. "The norm now seems to be that from award to approved final design is a six-month turnaround period," Haag said. The corps is further speeding the process by allowing the contractors to fast-track projects by beginning demolition and site prep work after three months of design work, Haag added.

Additionally, as the corps becomes more comfortable with new delivery methods, it is becoming more aggressive in applying them. "The design-build projects are becoming more sophisticated, more technically difficult," Haag said. "They are getting more confidence in the designs of the contractors."

The district's experimentation with different delivery methods will provide the basis for the achievement of a broader corps initiative: the standardization of design for all Army buildings. The Savannah District Office is in charge of creating the standard template for company operations facilities that will be applied nationwide.

"We are hoping that it will bring prices down on construction," Gray said.

Despite all of the creative contracting and design methods, the problem of labor shortfalls continues to plague the program.

"When we hit $250 million in work, the contractors are starting to compete with one another for the local labor and we are getting a shortage," Gray said. "Next year we are going to place about $300 million, and it is going to be a challenge to the contractors to do the work."

Gray attributes the problem partly to the bases' proximity to the Raleigh-Durham area, which is booming, and the inability to get Hispanic workers onto the base.

"The INS has been doing stings at the sites, catching immigrant workers at the gates using fake IDs," he added. "It has made the worker shortage worse."

The contractors are trying to find ways to address the issue, but only have been able to find stopgap solutions. Sauer has affiliated itself with unions wherever possible and is bringing subcontractors on earlier in the procurement process, but the problem remains largely unresolved, said Haag. "I'm not sure how it is going to be addressed in the long run," he said.