NGA mission is defense, not fixing blight
Our regional partners in St. Louis are making the case for reparations by the federal government: Not for slavery, or taking the native people’s land or interning our Japanese-American families during World War II. They suggest they receive reparations because the feds segregated 13,000 people during the 1950s in the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project.
They are tracing white flight and redlining and urban decay to that one failed social experiment and using that to guilt President Barack Obama into direct intervention, saying he owes St. Louis the new $1.6 billion western HQ for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They remind him that he promised St. Louis would be one of eight new Promise Zone initiative communities dedicated to urban renewal.
North St. Louis obviously needs a fix for the vacant lots, burned-out shells and crime-ridden neighborhoods near the former Pruitt-Igoe site. The good thing is that the site has 99 acres with only 47 residents that just needs police resources to secure it and economic resources to allow it to develop the mixed-income residential and retail community envisioned by the federal Promise Zone program.
Pushing out residents to make way for the NGA would more likely gentrify and destroy the local community than save it from decades of neglect by city leaders.
At the same time, St. Louis leaders for their gain would compromise the NGA mission by land-locking the new facility, putting its perimeter right up against densely populated and trafficked areas and distancing the facility from its main clients at Scott Air Force Base. Let’s not forget that court action to assemble the land is barely started, with significant costs to clear and clean before NGA could be built.
Putting NGA on hundreds of acres with MetroLink access, near Interstate 64 and next to Scott means easy access for workers but a perimeter secured by a military base that is broad enough to keep the facility out of a car bomb’s blast radius — an uncomfortable reality as the smoke clears in Brussels. It means the secure data cable stretches for a few hundred yards instead of 20 miles along open country and under a river. It means the coming doubling of the facility’s 3,100 jobs has shovel-ready elbow room.
Calling on Obama to put his thumb on the scale in favor of one community over another is just wrong. NGA is a spy mapping agency, and its defense mission, security and reaching its full potential are the paramount considerations owed our nation and our taxpayers.
This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "NGA mission is defense, not fixing blight."