Tyndall Air Force Base Hurricane Michael Recovery Industry Day #3: Tyndall Master Plan

Briefed by: Col. Lori Walden, Director, Tyndall Program Management Office

Industry Day is a collaborative effort where senior military and business leaders come together to discuss innovations and the future of Tyndall Air Force Base and the impact to the community. We realize there is no better way to rebuild Tyndall AFB without a partnership that includes both the local community and Industry. This is our third Industry Day in what we hope will be a series of exchanges to help identify innovative ways to move forward as we rebuild Tyndall together. On behalf of the Air Force we are pleased that you have taken time away from your busy schedules to assist us with the rebuild at one of the Air Force’s most important bases in its inventory.

Industry Day was held at Florida State University – Panama City’s Holley Academic Center, Panama City, Florida

Transcript

Now, we welcome Colonel Lori Walden, Director of the Tyndall Program Management Office. Colonel Walden has been serving here since June. She oversees the day to day operations of the rebuild. She’s on temporary duty here until the end of September. In her full time Reserve job, she serves as the Commander of the 622nd Civil Engineering Group from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Georgia, and oversees more than 1,100 Airmen. Today, Walden will be briefing the Tyndall Master Plan. We welcome Colonel Walden to the stage. (applause)

Thank you, Don. Good morning, everyone.

[Audience] Good morning.

So, the brief that I’m gonna give you today, this morning, is just an overview of the master planning efforts that will feed and is feeding into where we’re going today and over the next several years. As you’re aware, our senior leaders asked us to rebuild at Tyndall not the base we had, but to the base that we need as Colonel Laidlaw mentioned earlier, a digitally integrated air base for the 21st Century. You may have heard this referred to also as the installation of the future. Tyndall has a unique opportunity to do something different and innovative to align well with the Chief of Staff’s vision for Tyndall Air Force Base. What you’ll see here is just a very basic overall timeline of where we’re going from October of last year when Hurricane Michael hit, to that October 1st, 2023, when we’re expected to receive that first F-35. You’ll see that by the red flag. You’ll notice to the left of the today mark there has been a lot of action and activity going preparing for how do we get to that point to receive that first F-35. We have condensed a lot of planning and programming efforts from about an 18-month process down to about 8 months, so we have really been sprinting to make sure that we’re there, ready for that first aircraft. This slide is probably gonna be a little bit more detail of what you would like to see today. And, the bottom two sections, the FSRM or repair and the MILCON or military construction, those are what we’re gonna focus on today, going over the things as General Malonson mentioned earlier. For the FSRM or Repair Program, this year Tyndall will receive $288 million for repair projects and we are on track to award all of those projects by the end of the fiscal year. Some of those projects have been awarded and have already started. For the military construction piece, which is gonna be the bulk of the discussion today as well, for FY19 under the disaster recovery funding, Tyndall received $577 million for those efforts. And again, you can see the bulk of the activity is gonna happen moving forward with the construction to be ready to receive those first F-35. Air Force leadership established both the process and the planning guidance to insure we plan to build the Tyndall Air Force Base that we need not the Tyndall Air Force Base that we had. This slide has the key goals for the rebuild and articulates some of those initial ideas on just what the installation of the future should be here at Tyndall. Please note two key elements reflected on this slide talk about reducing costs. This is really important because the installation of the future is not about building a shiny air base. We, absolutely, are in a cost constrained Air Force. The installation of the future is about incorporating modern technologies and techniques to reduce the total cost of ownership to our physical plant. We enlisted the help of one of our industry partners and awarded a planning contract in December 2018 to develop three primary planning districts. The contracted effort looked at these three planning areas. I’m gonna shine on this side. The Flightline District, which is north of 98, the Support District, located south, and then, over to the right, the Crooked Island District, which was located at a very low elevation and experienced a strong storm surge. This is where the research lab was located. The Support and Flightline Districts were the most densely populated and had the most facilities. And subsequently, those experienced the largest amount of damage. I’ll go into those three districts in a little more detail for you. So, this is the Flightline District. Woops, I’m sorry. Wanna point out this line that you see at the bottom, that’s highway 98 for reference. One of the themes of the Air Field Development Plan was to relocate functions which did not need direct access to the flightline and move those functions to the support side of the base. The air field is constrained by highway 98 to the south that I just pointed out which limits the development on the north side. Two organizations that we moved from the flightline side to the support center were the Civil Engineer Squadron and the logistics functions. Most of the facilities for those two organizations were damaged or destroyed. We are able to save a couple of those facilities from the logistics to repurpose those. So, starting on the left and moving to the right, I’ll just highlight some of the mission sets. You’ll notice the white facilities, those are existing buildings and those are buildings that sustained lesser damage and we’ll be able to reuse those in the Master Plan moving forward. This little group of white facilities to the left, that’s the Air Operations Center that you heard Colonel Laidlaw talk about. Moving a little bit farther to the right, this is gonna be the F-35 campus. The section in the center, that is the shared support and the transient section. A group of facilities to the right of that is the Weapons Evaluation Group or the WEG. This next group of facilities is a reserved area for the proposed MQ-9 campus. And then, the smaller facilities to the right, those are the MU-2 facilities, which is another enduring mission as Colonel Laidlaw mentioned. So, in summary, the pre-hurricane flightline had 163 facilities with more than 50 of those facilities being over 50 years old. In the end, we were able to save about 40% of those facilities. 97 buildings will be demolished and replaced with 39 buildings. Moving on south of 98 is the Support District. This district differs from the Flightline District in that we didn’t significantly change either the customer or the mission set, with the exception of the added capabilities of Civil Engineering and logistics that we moved south off of the flightline side. The damage was also less significant on the support side. There were several larger, newer facilities that had been built to modern construction standards and they fared much better with minimal damage. Those facilities actually became the backbone of the Master Plan moving forward. What didn’t survive Michael so well was the lodging which had already been approved for replacement before the hurricane and the dorms, as Colonel Laidlaw mentioned. Only three of eleven will remain which will present a hardship housing the Airmen until we can get those facilities rebuilt. There was an emphasis on consolidating into single facilities as well as combining functions in order to promote compact and walkable campuses. By consolidating functions and some minor realignment of roads, we were able to make room for those relocated flightline functions as well as provide for anticipated future requirements and preserve open space for any future unknown requirements. If you can see on this map this little peanut shaped area, that’s the family support area. That will have a lot of expansion capacity, but it will include the temporary lodging facility, the youth center and two day care centers. The Community Corp, and I’ll add to this map, the white facilities are the existing facilities as well, the brown facilities are the new facilities. The Community Corp, which is this section, is anchored on the commissary. The commissary is this large white facility. It includes things such as the new chapel complex, a community commons, a bowling alley, a U.S. Post Office, library, gathering spaces and eating options. There’s a pedestrian spine that will connect the common areas to this section here, which is the dorm area. It’s a little hard to see on this map, but there are three existing dorms here and the rest of these would be the new construction dorms. And, that pedestrian spine goes all the way to the industrial complex, where you’ll have your civil engineering and logistics. The last area, as I mentioned, is the industrial complex to the right for civil engineer and logistics compounds. There will be a reconfigured main gate, which is located here. And the, Florida Department of Transportation will be building an overpass to this gate, which will allow us to provide a path for the Airmen who are living on the south side of base to walk or bike to their job location on the flightline, promoting that walkable campus. The Crooked Island District, which is home to the AFCEC Research Facilities, presented a different challenge and problem set than the other two areas as I mentioned before. The lab was about six to eight feet above sea level and experienced four to six feet of storm surge and flooding. We’re gonna move that location, those facilities, just north of 98, to an elevation of about 20 feet above sea level. In the process, we’ll consolidate a hodgepodge of about 20 facilities into four, making those repurposable and flexible for current research needs and future research growth and development. By moving those facilities north of 98, it will also put them closer to the ground demolition range and air frame testing area. There’re a few areas outside of those three major planning efforts that I want to cover briefly for you. The Bonita Bay Marina, which is located right at the end of the Dupont Bridge, the MWR facilities and activities that were there will be consolidated and moved to the marina area in the housing section. The repair efforts focused at the Bonita Bay will focus on those drone recovery operations only. The housing area, which is down in this section, while the rebuild of that area is not being managed by the PMO, all 867 houses there were damaged beyond being able to live in so they are all damaged. In the AMMO District, we’ll re-cite the AMMO Districts to the north. We’ll re-cite and consolidate a couple of admin type facilities, allowing for higher storage capacity for the existing storage facilities. For the sub-scale drone activities, we’ll plan military construction project to move the administrative and maintenance functions from five existing maintenance buildings away from the flightline to the 8500 area down in this area consolidating around 12 facilities down to, like I said, three to five. This is the summary slide for the Master Planning effort. I skipped past a lot of the robust process that got us to this point, but I believe the result of the planning efforts hit the nail on the head with what General Goldfein identified, when he asked us to develop the Tyndall, Tyndall into the installation that we need. We’re driving down the total cost of ownership and maximizing cost efficiency by leveraging the facilities we could save and incorporating them into the new Master Plan. We kept the constricted real estate on the flightline side to those flightline functions and we moved support functions to the support side of the base. We also incorporated the modern campus planning and the way people use different facilities with the campus layout. This concludes my brief on the Master Plan. I want to thank everyone for taking time out of your busy day to be here and I look forward to the discussion as we get into the more detailed panel discussions later. Thank you. (applause)