A federal inspector general’s report found several faults with the process the General Services Administration took to select Maryland over Virginia as the site for a new FBI headquarters.
But the report released Monday states the GSA’s own inspector general took no position on the final selection of Greenbelt over a site in Springfield.
Still, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said the findings outlined in the 54-page document confirm complaints by Virginia officials that the selection process, which was switched to Greenbelt from Springfield late in the years-long review, was “fundamentally tainted.”
“As GSA cooked the books, important cost criteria were improperly weighted without sufficient rationale,” Connolly said in a statement Monday. “As part of a rushed process that overruled the unanimous opinion of a panel of career civil servants, GSA provided inaccurate information to guide the site selection process.
“And we may never know the full extent of missteps in this process, because communication records were not properly preserved,” he said of the report, which said the GSA failed to preserve text messages between officials that had been working on the site selection.
But Maryland officials welcomed the report as further proof that Greenbelt is the best site for the FBI, whose headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington have been crumbling and in need of replacement for years.
“The report … confirms what Team Maryland has always said: There was no conflict of interest in the selection of Greenbelt, Maryland, as the site for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new consolidated headquarters,” said a joint statement Monday night from a group of state and federal officials: Gov. Wes Moore, Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen and Reps. Steny Hoyer and Glenn Ivey, all Democrats.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by William J. Ford over at Maryland Matters
