Construction boom is on at Osan; mall,
hotel among $106M in improvements
By Jim Lea, Osan bureau chief
OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea — The face and skyline of this U.S. air base is
changing literally by the day with a $106 million base make-over — and there’s
more on the drawing board.
Either recently opened, under construction or about to get under way are new enlisted
and officer dorms and a new 51st Fighter Wing headquarters and operations building.
There’s also a 350-room visitors' quarters, and a completely renovated and expanded
fitness center.
The Army and Air Force Exchange Service is preparing to start on a 170,000-square-foot
shopping mall that includes a bank and a post office, said Maj. Stephen E. Shea, deputy
commander of the 51st Civil Engineering squadron. The Defense Commissary Agency is working
on plans for a new store, and work will begin in 2003 on 328 family quarters.
Shea said the money for these and other planned projects is coming from three sources:
Congressionally appropriated military construction funds, host nation and non-appropriated
funds.
The $25 million, 350-room visitors' quarters — a "hotel" for transients
- is well under way and tentatively scheduled for completion next July.
"Each room will have television and microwave ranges," said Maj. Eva Wilson,
the squadron’s engineering flight commander.
Shea called the facility a "major force protection project that will allow us to
have people stay on base instead of at hotels in town." Discussions are going on now,
Wilson added, to put a U.S. franchise restaurant "like Chili’s in the immediate
vicinity."
The $7.6 million gym and fitness center upgrade should be finished by March, Wilson
said.
"The gym will be twice the size it was" she said. "There’ll be two
full-sized basketball courts with a running track mezzanine."
The $15.5 million, Korean-funded wing headquarters and operations building also is well
under way.
"It will collect the wing’s wartime command and control elements into one
hardened facility," Shea said.
One new three-story enlisted dorm opened in April and another is scheduled to be
completed in October.
"We’ll have ground breakings for five more dorms in the next 12 months,"
Wilson said. Those include both officer and enlisted facilities.
Shea said construction of a new vehicle maintenance facility complex and at least three
dorms will begin next year.
"But we think there’ll be a plus-up in the budget and if that happens, we
could have as many as six dorms under way next year," he said.
Next year’s "really big project," he said, will be a new, $35-to-$40
million civil engineering complex.
"We need the space where the complex currently is located to build new family
housing," he said.
The 328 new apartments will be in eight-floor towers that hold 104 to 112 apartments
each, he said.
But more family housing doesn’t mean more command-sponsored billets at the base,
he added.
"The number of units we’ll build is sized to meet our current
command-sponsored requirements," he said. "They will just allow us to get all
the families onto the base."
Construction is slated to begin in 2003 and will take about six years, he said.
Ten new senior officers quarters also are planned, he said.
Also in the offing are six more hardened aircraft shelters costing $18 million for the
base’s A-10 jets and a major runway renovation worth $4 million.
Shea said the future of construction funding for the base is bright, and if things work
out they way he hopes, the base will have more than $150 million in construction funds
alone going into next year.
"That’s almost one-third of the typical annual Air Force military
construction budget," he said.
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