Federal officials give Dooley update on Records Center construction
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
March 25, 2010
by Tim O'Neil
SPANISH LAKE -- Construction under way on a $112 million building to replace
the National Personnel Records Center in Overland ensures the retention of 800
jobs for the area, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley said Wednesday.
Federal officials and developers updated Dooley on the project, at 1829 Dunn
Road, where work began in November. When completed in 2011, the three-story
building will hold the records of 57 million people who served in the American
military from the late 1890s until a decade ago, when the service branches
moved to electronic records.
It will replace the mammoth records center at 9700 Page Avenue, which became
vulnerable when the Pentagon announced its realignment of military
installations in 2005. That building was built in 1956.
"This was not supposed to stay in St. Louis," Dooley said. "This is a win-win,
not only for the county, but for the whole metropolitan area."
The new site is just east of Hazelwood East Middle School and north of
Interstate 270. It also will house records of former civilian employees, now
kept at 111 Winnebago Street in St. Louis.
The Molasky Group, a Las Vegas developer, will own the 547,000-square-foot
building and lease it to the federal General Services Administration for about
$9.2 million annually, or $185 million over 20 years.
Mary Ruwwe, a regional official for the federal agency, defended the lease as
the only way to get the project done. She said the government usually wanted to
build and own a project of this sort.
"We are doing it this way because it's a funding mechanism that works," Ruwwe
said. "We knew we couldn't get funding to renew the old building, and this
(construction) project might not get congressional appropriation for years."
Chuck Moody, Molasky's senior vice president, said the lease payments would
cover upkeep and maintenance, which he estimated at about $2.8 million annually.
Ruwwe said the government needed a better environment for preserving the
records. The government gets 1.5 million requests each year for copies of
military records from service personnel, their families, historians and the
simply curious.
The project, a joint venture of Tarlton Corp. of St. Louis and Hardin
Construction Co. of Atlanta, will employ as many as 800 construction workers,
officials said. As of Wednesday, workers were digging for the foundation and
grading parts of the 29-acre site.
The National Archives Records Administration, which maintains the military
records, is to begin moving in April 2011 and be fully operational in November
2011. Bryan McGraw, an archives official, said the new building would use less
than half the floor space of the current one for storage because of higher
stacks and better retrieval systems.
Ruwwe said the government would probably demolish the records-storage building
on Page and keep the office addition for other agencies. A fire in 1973 damaged
or destroyed about 16 million records, including those for many Army veterans
of World War II.
