The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

Transportation to the “Mall” In response to your January AFSA News Briefs item regarding moving the Transportation Office, let me first say that the Bureau of Administration and State Department management at all levels fully endorses the 1995 Strategic Management Initiative rec- ommendation to “cluster all aspects of foreign transfers and other employee services in a single ‘mall’ location.” The operational realities of today’s State Department, however, reinforce the fact that this mall does not have to be in the Harry S Truman building. The Office of the Director of Foreign Assistance, cited in your news brief, is just the latest example of new, unantic- ipated space requirements. We intend to fulfill the 1995 rec- ommendation and provide a reliable platform from which employees and families are able to address their needs while still being able to attend to the needs of the nation during this trans- formational time. To accomplish this, we plan to move those elements of the existing HST Service Corridor that interface with employees and their families to join MED in Columbia Plaza (SA-1). By consolidating in SA- 1, this new mall would be in a build- ing that, while very close to HST, offers the additional advantages of commercial parking, proximity to Metro and, potentially, drop-in child care (to be negotiated with Diplotots). We have started the planning process and will coordinate with the affected offices on the timing and lay- out of the new mall. Doing so will also offer us an opportunity to perhaps add some additional offices not currently in the corridor, such as the Iraq Orientation and In-Processing Center, to the mall concept. Our goal is a “one-stop shop” for our employees at all stages of their careers. We will also be consulting with AFSA, AAFSW and others on the details of this newmall as the plan pro- gresses. This will be a multiyear effort and, like all projects at State, it is dependent on budget resources. But we are committed to the mall concept and convinced that it will ensure a more family- and employee-friendly consolidated service environment. Raj Chellaraj Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Washington, D.C. Transportation Move: Bad Idea The January AFSA News contained an item titled “AFSA Urges State Not to Move Transportation Office.” The director general, the Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide, the Family Liaison Office and many FS employees strongly object to mov- ing Transportation out of the HST Service Corridor. Recently, a new proposal was made — to move the entire service corridor to SA-1. Management has said that we should provide employee support 24/7, but what this proposal really says is: “Employee services and support are not important enough to be in HST.” This unspoken message is not consis- tent with State Department values and culture. We are asking our employees to take on new, more difficult and even dangerous tasks, and we set a premium on providing the best support we can. This includes keeping the service corri- dor in the location where elements of it have served people well for 40 years. Separating it from the rest of the build- ing would reduce our ability to serve and support hundreds of transferring employees for years to come, and would not be a positive legacy for the current management team. Creating a service mall in SA-1 is of little value — especially when a func- tioning system already exists. The original recommendation back in 1995 was to expand what was then called the Foreign Service Lounge, but to leave it in place — not move it. On the current service corridor, nine offices assist transferring em- ployees, including the Transporta- tion Office, which receives 4,000 drop- in consultations annually. For em- ployees who work in HST and who try to prepare transfers during a lim- ited lunch hour, the advantages of not leaving the building are obvious. It would be an enormous waste of time to have to run over to SA-1 every time they need travel or transportation ser- vices. The expense and hassle of moving an entire corridor of offices to SA-1 also makes it questionable. Further- more, the move would be incomplete, because there are no plans to reassem- ble all the offices providing services for transfers to the newmall. Why not just move newcomers into vacant space? The proposal to move the service corridor may be couched in glowing terms of creating a wonderful newmall. However, it does not seem to be based on an understanding of how the trans- L ETTERS 6 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 7