Eight Loudoun County sites have been submitted to the federal General Services Administration (GSA) for consideration to house the next Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters, Loudoun officials announced Wednesday.

Since late 2011 county leaders have been discussing a plan to lure the FBI relocation. The bureau has outgrown its present office in downtown Washington D.C.

Members of the current Board of Supervisors, who took office in 2012, have escalated the talk in recent weeks, expressing their desire to make a full-fledged pitch for the bureau to locate in eastern Loudoun.

Given the FBI's operational expansion since 9/11 and in years prior, the current J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. has become an “untenable headquarters situation,” according to a Loudoun County report.

Loudoun is the only county along the 23-mile Metro Silver Line route with greenfield opportunities, the report states. The new FBI site will require at least 40-55 acres for a 2.1 million-square-foot facility for 11,000 employees.

Loudoun officials are boasting the county's transit options, available acreage and high tech and data storage capacity to draw the feds' eye.

The sites submitted Wednesday include: Dulles World Center (75 acres), West Dulles Station North (224 acres), International City (260 acres), DuPont Fabros (233 acres), Loudoun Parkway (127 acres), Moorefield Station (387 acres), Northwoods (301 acres) and Stonewall (301 acres).

With the exception of Stonewall, all the sites are less than two miles from the forthcoming Metrorail Silver Line extension running to the Dulles airport and into Loudoun County. The new Silver Line is slated to be in operation around 2018.

Loudoun Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott York (R-At Large) highlighted the fact the county wasn't offering one or two options for the FBI, but a minimum of eight, and possible more in the future.

“These greenfield sites offer the lowest cost per square foot and the highest flexibility of any sites under consideration for the new FBI headquarters,” York said.

Jim Herbert, a Loudoun County business development officer, said the new headquarters “must be viable beyond the next 30 or 40 years.”

“It must have enough acreage to provide security, flexibility and sustainability for the foreseeable future,” Herbert said in a prepared statement. Herbert added that up to 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic flows through Loudoun data centers each day.

“The nature of the data center business requires the utmost in facility security,” he continued. “Likewise, the FBI headquarters must be built to satisfy ISC Level V security specifications. The fact that the data center industry is thriving in Loudoun points to the fact that we know how to do security. It’s another compelling reason why the FBI should locate here.”

Officials with the local Department of Economic Development noted the eight sites released Wednesday “are not inclusive of all possible Loudoun sites the GSA and FBI may want to consider.”


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