Late last week, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) authorized the start of construction on a new office building in New Mexico that will house more than 1,000 employees affiliated with the agency’s headquarters.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapon agency announced the milestone in a press release Tuesday. The planned Albuquerque Complex Project will provide a single office for some 1,200 NNSA employees — mostly administrative personnel — now working in a series of World War II-vintage facilities scattered across Kirtland Air Force Base.
The new office building will take until 2023 to complete and cost just over $200 million, according to the NNSA’s fiscal 2019 budget request. That is around $25 million more than the cost cap Congress imposed on the project in the 2018 omnibus budget bill signed into law in March.
It was not clear who the contractor is for the project. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is handling procurement for the NNSA — which is footing the bill for the faciltiy — and access to most of the Corps’ procurement notes is restricted to the public. A NNSA spokesperson said Tuesday the contract will be a firm-fixed-price deal.
