Browsing: Facilities

FBI employees now scattered in four locations in the Phoenix area will move into a new 200,000-square-foot office building about two years from now. The General Services Administration announced Wednesday it has selected the Phoenix office of construction firm Ryan Companies to build the $62 million facility. The building will be owned by Ryan and leased to GSA for use by the FBI under a 20-year lease. Many companies apparently competed for the build-to-suit lease project, indicating the high level of interest in government projects in a time of economic uncertainty in the construction industry. John Strittmatter, president of Ryan’s…

Employees at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute will be moving into new digs in 2013. The General Services Administration announced Wednesday that it’s awarded a build-to-suit lease for 575,000 square feet of office space for the agency, whose employees now are scattered among five buildings. The JBG Companies of Washington will develop two facilities, connected by a central atrium, at the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Montgomery County, Md., for the agency. JBG is leasing land for the project from Johns Hopkins University. The facilities will be built to achieve the second-highest rating from the U.S. Green Building…

Last week, I wrote how the General Services Administration was seeking applicants for a newly created position of chief greening officer. At the time, the vacancy announcement had been posted to private-sector job boards but not on the government’s official jobs site, USAJobs.  The job listing has now been posted to USAJobs, and it offers some key details that were left out of the earlier post. For instance, the job will be a career position at the GS-15 level, which has a starting salary of nearly $124,000 in Washington. As a senior adviser to the head of  GSA’s Public Buildings Service,…

Update 3:50 p.m.: It appears that the man who flew his plane into the Austin office building may have intentionally targeted the building because it houses the IRS. A lengthy diatribe against the tax agency was posted on a website registered to Joe Stack, who has been identified as the pilot.   In addition, earlier reports that the CIA also leased space in the facility were incorrect, according to a federal official. The General Services Administration leases more than 44,000 square feet of space in the building for the IRS.  Original post: A small plane crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, this…

The Energy Department’s Federal Energy Management Program is offering free online training sessions to help federal energy and environmental professionals learn the basics about cutting energy consumption in their facilities and operations. The sessions, held the first Thursday of each month, will discuss requirements to report greenhouse gas emissions, install advanced electrical meters on facilities, cut water consumption and make existing buildings more energy efficient, among others. The 90-minute sessions will be offered live via satellite or through streaming video at your desktop. Registrations are now being accepted online. The first session was an overview of the executive order President Obama issued in…

The roof of the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Md., collapsed this morning, WUSA9 is reporting. The building is the Smithsonian’s main off-site storage warehouse for museum artifacts. It’s unknown what, if any, artifacts may have been damaged by the roof collapse, according to the report. Firefighters responded to the scene before 7 a.m. and shut off electricity and natural gas to the warehouse. Officials have been warning about the dangers of roofs collapsing from the weight of all the snow the area has received. According to Michael McGill, spokesman for the General Services Administration’s National Capital Region, damage…

The White House just announced that the federal government will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020, compared to 2008 benchmarks. The ambitious federal target is the aggregate of percentage reduction targets reported by 35 federal agencies earlier this month. President Obama ordered agencies in an October executive order to begin measuring and reducing their carbon footprints, the first such comprehensive effort by the federal government. I’ll be sitting in on a conference call at 11 a.m. with administration officials to discuss the initiative. Check back at www.federaltimes.com for a full report.

Did President Obama just call out Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., for holding up the confirmation of Martha Johnson to lead GSA? You decide. Here is what Obama said in tonight’s State of the Union address regarding the hold up of several of his nominees: The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. And here are two links to our past posts about the hold Bond has on Johnson’s full Senate confirmation. Both note the hold is directly related to Bond’s desire to move a federal complex…

The folks over at WeLoveDC.com asked readers today to name a building they’d like to see erased from the DC skyline, and the results could spark a federal investigation. Most readers called for the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building to be torn down. The headquarters building, built between 1967 and 1974, is made of poured concrete in the Brutalist architectural style that was popular at the time but has since gone out of fashion. Other readers suggested that what the building really needs is an overhaul, not a demolition, pointing out that restoring outdated buildings is not only environmentally preferable but…

Starting Feb. 2, Susan Brita will be the new deputy administrator of the General Services Administration, FedLine has learned. Brita is the staff director for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management. The subcommittee has oversight of GSA’s Public Building Service and federal real property management. She replaces Barney Brasseux, a GSA career veteran, who recently retired. This announcement fills one gap in the agency’s leadership team which has seen an unusual amount of turnover in recent weeks. Just before Christmas, Stephen Leeds took over the role of acting administrator from Paul…