Promising an insecure legacy to spy agency
We was robbed, folks, and we’re convinced the thief resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.
The new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency site decision was properly falling to Scott Air Force Base up to a few weeks before its director, Robert Cardillo, shocked everyone by saying North St. Louis was the best site. So what changed in those final weeks? Someone with legacy worries put their thumb on the scale and suddenly a defense mission became an urban renewal issue.
Look at the Environmental Impact Statement if you want proof. Changes between the early version and final version made mountains out of mole hills. It was so hastily rewritten to rationalize the new decision that multiple mistakes were made.
There is no Osage River in our area. We are not St. Clair County, Michigan. The workforce issue cited is off because none of the St. Louis colleges are able to turn out the mapping expertise needed by NGA: Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is the only place locally to find Geographic Information System expertise and graduates.
Logic dictates that you put a major defense installation that handles sensitive spy functions next to a secure military installation as our nation has done for 40 years and as military planners a decade ago assumed would be done in this case. Scott Air Force Base is the major consumer of intelligence from NGA, offers a secure perimeter and lots of open land. The future employees of NGA will be those SIUE grads as well as the military personnel separating from duty at Scott who already hold security clearances and will be preferred hires because they are veterans.
We applaud St. Clair County leaders for getting the NGA to give us all of April, not just 15 days, to tear apart the tortured logic that boosts up North St. Louis. Our community, filled with former service members, needs to comment on the poor decision at nextngawest.com.
Exposing the decision points reworked to support Pres. Barack Obama’s mandate that defense spending be infused in a tortured community may not change the end result. However it will lay bare the liberal agenda that trumped logic on this decision.
A Promise Zone should be about bringing grocery stores and retailers and new housing to an area, not about hoping hipsters decide to ride their bikes to work at NGA from some future North St. Louis townhouses. Those NGA workers will drive to work and drive home, and cannot be counted on to spend money in North St. Louis to end decades of neglect by law enforcement and the financial world.
Hope for change in North St. Louis by investing in police, infrastructure and business — not by sacrificing the security and mission of a defense agency.
This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Promising an insecure legacy to spy agency."