Oklahoma City’s new federal building not welcomed by all

Efforts to replace the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are upsetting some federal employees in that area. On Oct. 15, the General Services Administration awarded a $40 million construction contract to Flintco Inc. to build a new federal building and park to replace the Murrah Building, which was destroyed by a truck bomb on April 19, 1995. The attack killed 168 men, women and children, and wounded hundreds more. Timothy McVeigh, who admitted setting the bomb, was executed on June 11. "Watching this new building take shape is important to Oklahoma City, as another sign of overcoming the adversity of terrorism," said Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla., who pressed Congress to fund the construction project. "It's a key part of the new vibrancy in downtown Oklahoma City and will spur other new development in an area that greatly needs it." But some federal employees aren't excited about the new federal building, citing its location and design as sticking points. "[About a year ago] we sent a survey out to the employees and said tell us what you think and how you feel about it, and there were a lot of strong feelings about rebuilding," LeAnn Jenkins, executive director of the Oklahoma Federal Executive Board, said. "We got some pretty strong responses on that and we gave those to the agencies to let them know how their employees felt about it and also to GSA." The new federal building will be located two blocks away from the site of the former Murrah building, which is now the site of the Oklahoma City National Memorial. The memorial was built in remembrance of the bombing victims. According to GSA, the building's two-block campus-style design includes safety recommendations from a Justice Department study, such as setbacks from the streets, earthen barriers, trees and posts. But safety should not be the only thing considered in the building's design, said Calvin Moser, a Department of Housing and Urban Development employee who worked in the Murrah building for 18 years. Moser was on the eighth floor of the Murrah building when the bombing occurred and said he remembers sitting at his desk and looking down into the crevasse left from the explosion. "[The new building design] has a hole in it like the shell of what was left of the Murrah building," Moser said. "This is reminiscent of what we looked at and what we were in immediately after the bombing. There are so many things in that design that are just terrible, terrible remembrances." Moser, who sits on the Outreach Committee of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism and is a past president of the Murrah Building Survivors' Association, said he is concerned about the impact the new building will have on his colleagues and other survivors. "I am a supervisor and I have employees that are just now getting back to normalcy," he explained. "They are going to be basket cases…because they are going to be in a facility that is going to be traumatizing them." GSA officials said the reason it has taken so long to replace the Murrah building is that they wanted to make sure they got feedback from all the stakeholders, especially federal employees. "We held more than 10 meetings, inviting all of the employees of the federal agencies going into the building, so they could add their input into the design process," said Leighton Waters, GSA's Acting Regional Administrator for the region that includes Oklahoma. "They had ample opportunity to contribute their thoughts as we moved through this process." According to Waters, the location was chosen because it was in an area directly affected by the bombing, a part of the city that needed revitalizing. An earlier four-block design plan was scrapped because its architecture didn't blend well with Oklahoma City's downtown area, and when the current two-block design was pitched employees were given an opportunity to offer comments on that as well, he said. That feedback is evident in the new building's campus-style design. "Feedback from the employees indicated they did not want a high-rise building," Waters said. "They wanted a park-type environment with trees, that didn't have the high-rise effect." As far as any resemblance to the bombed out carcass of the Murrah building, Waters said: "That was certainly never the intent." A ground-breaking ceremony for the new building is planned for the latter part of this year. Moser, however, is still concerned about the well-being of the survivors and the impact the building will have on them. "It's really not going to influence me, I've got enough years in [so that] I can retire, but it's the people that we work with that make the job great and I just have a real allegiance to those people and that's why I've gotten so vocal," he said. "I think it's only right that we consider those people."