Rep. Jason Chaffetz Plugs His Next Oversight Hearing (New Construction at U.S. Embassy Mexico)

Representative Jason Chaffetz was interviewed by CBS News today and he dropped the bombshell news that there are some problems with the big new U.S. Embassy construction project in Mexico City.

It is an embassy that was supposed to cost $577 million to build, but the construction estimate has gone up by one third -- and the State Department hasn't even broken ground yet.

No one disputes that the current U.S. Embassy in Mexico City is crowded, outdated and needs to be replaced. So four years ago the State Department bought a 15 acre plot in a former industrial district for $120 million. But there was a catch: the site had housed a Colgate-Palmolive factory for decades, which left behind hazardous waste. Colgate has been cleaning the site but it's been three and a half years and it's still not ready for construction.

"It's a bit of a fiasco," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

Fiasco? I've seen fiascos, and this isn't one yet. The Mexico City project is certainly a Real Big Deal for the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, its first new embassy job to be executed from start to finish under OBO's Design Excellence program. Also very costly, which is a given due to the large size of U.S. Embassy Mexico, with over 1,300 'desk positions' to be accommodated.

There are also environmental remediation problems to be worked out with the previous owner of the construction site. That site is a so-called 'brown field,' a property that had a prior industrial use and is being redeveloped, in contrast to a 'green field' or previously undeveloped property. Building in brown fields is part of the whole design excellence whim-wham, since it allows new embassies to be located near city centers rather than on their edges or beyond (which is a common complaint about Fortress Embassies). The Mexico City project is squarely in the center of the city, and only about 4 kilometers from the current embassy location.

As for the high cost of the project, that will presumably be offset by the proceeds of sale of existing embassy properties, some of which are in super-prime locations. That intention was announced way back in 2010 when the embassy signed the contract to acquire the construction site:

Mexico City, October 27, 2010 —Ambassador Anthony Wayne, on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, today signed a contract with Colgate-Palmolive, S.A. de C.V., to acquire a property in the New Polanco area of Mexico City in order to construct a new United States Embassy to replace the existing building on Paseo de la Reforma … The existing embassy compound on Reforma, as well as any excess land at the new site, will be offered for sale at a later date.

Fourteen sites are now up for sale, which means that the taxpayers might come away from this deal with a profit.

By the way, there is absolutely nothing new or newsworthy in this matter, no matter how breathlessly Rep. Chaffetz revealed it all to CBS News. You could read all about the Mexico City project, and Congressional concern for costs and environmental remediation, in the last appropriations bill for STATE, FOREIGN OPERATIONS, AND RELATED PROGRAMS:

Enhanced notification requirements.—The Congressional Budget
Justification for Department of State Operations, Fiscal Year 2015 estimates the cost for construction of the New Embassy Compound in Mexico City, Mexico at $763,500,000. The Committee is troubled that this is an escalation in cost of more than 38 percent in the two years since the initial estimate was provided. Cost increases of this magnitude, as well as reports of other new embassy project cost escalations, are of great concern to the Committee. Accordingly, in order to enhance the oversight of new construction projects, the Committee recommendation modifies and expands section 7004(d) of the bill to require that all notifications for the purchase of land and for the award of construction contracts be subject to the regular notification procedures of, and prior approval by, the Committees on Appropriations.

Notifications made pursuant to section 7004(d) shall include the following information, at a minimum: (1) the location and size of the property to be acquired, including the proximity to existing United States diplomatic facilities and host government ministries; (2) the justification of need for acquiring the property and construction of new facilities; (3) the total projected cost of the project delineated by site acquisition, project development, design/construction, and any other relevant costs; (4) any unique requirements of the project which may drive up the cost of the project, such as consular workload, legal environment, physical and/or security requirements, and seismic capabilities; (5) any religious, cultural, or political factors which may affect the cost, location, or construction timeline; (6) the current and projected number of desks, agency presence, and the projected number of United States direct hire staff, Locally Engaged Staff, and Third Country Nationals; (7) the current and projected number of beds, if applicable; (8) the most recent rightsizing analysis; and (9) a justification for exceeding the staffing projections of such rightsizing analysis, if applicable. Additionally, the Committee directs the Department of State to carefully review the design and cost of the Mexico City new embassy compound and to provide updated design plans and options for reducing the cost of the facility to the Committees on Appropriations prior to the obligation of additional funds for this project from funds made available in this Act or prior Acts.

Watching Rep. Chaffetz do his song and dance for CBS News was more entertaining than reading that dry appropriations bill language, I will concede. But he brings nothing new of substance.

OBO's Excellent (Design) Adventure

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The Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has made its first official departure from the architectural diplo-kitsch of the Standard Embassy Design, and intends to replace the old U.S. Embassy in Mexico City (pictured above) with a bespoke masterpiece from the new Design Excellence program. All details about that masterpiece are still to be determined, so we'll have to trust OBO on that for now.

OBO announced the opening of a design competition for the Mexico City job on Friday:

The Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has shortlisted nine design teams for the New Embassy Compound in Mexico City, Mexico.

The shortlisted teams, in no particular order, are:

AECOM/Snohetta
Allied Works Architecture
Antoine Predock Architect / Moody-Nolan
Diller Scofidio + Renfro / Buro Happhold
Ennead Architects
Miller Hull Partnership
Morphosis Architects
Skidmore Owings and Merrill
Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects

Fifty-four firms responded to the public notification for prospective offerors [see it here] to compete. This initial shortlist of offerors will assemble their technical teams and submit detailed information on their organization and qualifications.

The Mexico City design/bid/build project, scheduled for construction award in fiscal year 2015, is the first solicited under OBO’s new Design Excellence program. This holistic approach to project development and delivery seeks to utilize the best methods, technologies, and staff abilities to produce facilities that are outstanding in all respects. The overall strategy focuses on the integration of purpose, function, flexibility, art, safety, security, sustainability, and maintainability.

That last sentence reads like it came straight out of an architectural charrette, which I'm sure it did. So, our project strategy will be to holistically integrate "purpose, function, flexibility, art, safety, security, sustainability, and maintainability" into a new office building. All that into the same building. Okay, but I think reality will set in at some point and OBO will need to make some unwanted trade-offs.

For starters, where in the enormous and densely-packed megalopolis of Mexico City is there a site that is large enough to build an Excellent Embassy on, but also close enough to the downtown business district and host government core to be highly functional for clients and embassy officers? That's trade-off Number 1 right there.

And there will be a trade-off on the program level, as well. An Excellent Embassy is going to cost more than a standard embassy design when all is said and done - yes, it will, despite the Design Excellence program stuff about higher first costs leading to lower life-cycle costs - and that means an old embassy at some less important post will not get replaced. OBO will choose to do one high-toned new building instead of two inelegant boxes.  

Regarding the design competition, I'm guessing that Skidmore Owings & Merrill has the inside track. SOM designed the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which was the second-largest overseas construction project ever undertaken by OBO and a Design Excellence project in all but name (see this for details), and also the late-1990s new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. The Ottawa design was extremely un-fortressy, maybe too much so even for an embassy in Canada.

All reservations aside, I am looking forward to seeing how this excellent adventure turns out. If nothing else, it will be a refreshing change from the heavily standardized and regimented era of Major General (ret.) Charles C. Williams, Director and Chief Operating Officer, OBO, March 2001 to December 2007.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Another Wiki-Casualty?

Mexico's President Calderon was in Washington yesterday for a one-day visit. The WaPo reports that he pronounced himself highly offended by our embassy's frank assessments of his government's continued shortcomings in its muddled, but nevertheless laudatory, war against the drug cartels, and he threatens to take out his resentments on the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Thursday that the release of State Department cables criticizing Mexico's anti-drug fight had caused "severe damage" to its relationship with the United States and suggested that tensions had risen so dramatically that he could no longer work with the American ambassador in his country.

Calderon's comments were the strongest to date on the secret cables distributed by WikiLeaks, which have threatened to disrupt what both sides have hailed as increasingly close cooperation against Mexico's violent drug gangs.

The Mexican president, at the start of a one-day visit to Washington, suggested that the release of the cables had caused turmoil on his national security team. He took aim at one U.S. cable that said that Mexican military officials had "risk-averse habits."

"It's difficult if suddenly you are seeing the courage of the army [questioned]. For instance, they have lost probably 300 soldiers ... and suddenly somebody in the American embassy, they [say] the Mexican soldiers aren't brave enough," Calderon told Washington Post reporters and editors.

"Or you decide to play the game that they are not coordinated enough, and suddenly start to bring information to one agency and not to the other and try to get them to compete."

Calderon's remark appeared to be a reference to a cable signed by Ambassador Carlos Pascual that described how the Mexican navy captured a major trafficker after U.S. officials gave them information that the Mexican army had not acted upon.

"We have an expression in Mexico, which says, 'Don't help me, compadre,'" Calderon said sarcastically, using the Spanish word for a close friend.

Asked whether he could continue to work with the U.S. ambassador, the Mexican leader said, "That is a question that maybe I will talk [about] with President Obama." The two leaders were scheduled to meet at midday.

Pressed on whether he had lost confidence in Pascual, Calderon paused and then said, "It's difficult to build and it's easy to lose."

-- snip --

If Pascual was recalled, he would be the most prominent U.S. casualty of the WikiLeaks scandal. Only one American ambassador has had to leave the country where he was based because of the cables - Ambassador Gene Cretz, who took an extended break from Libya before the anti-government demonstrations erupted there.

Read the whole thing here - Calderon: WikiLeaks caused severe damage to U.S.-Mexico relations.

Calderon had already aired his resentments more extensively in an interview with El Universal, the Mexico City daily paper:

As officials from both countries vow to jointly avenge the murder of a U.S. federal agent, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accused senior American diplomats of damaging the cross-border relationship with criticism of Mexico's public security forces.

In a wide-ranging interview published Tuesday in El Universal, one of Mexico City's leading newspapers, Calderon charged that U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual's "ignorance has translated into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico" that has caused "an impact and an irritation in our own team."

Calderon was reacting to a barrage of analytic cables - some signed by Pascual, others by senior embassy officials - that discuss the perceived shortcomings of Mexico's intelligence services, the conduct of its army in Calderon's anti-crime campaign and the inability of its security forces to work well with one another.

The U.S. Embassy offered no immediate reaction to the interview.

The cables, some classified secret, have been published by the website WikiLeaks, with still more appearing this week. Until Tuesday, Mexican officials have responded to the cables with shrugs and condemnations of WikiLeaks rather than the diplomats.

Not any more.

"They have done a lot of damage with the stories they tell and that, in truth, they distort," Calderon said of the cables in the interview.

Read the original, Spanish language, interview here.

By the way, I notice that President Calderon offered a derogatory assessment of his own in that interview. He used an idiomatic expression to compare U.S. government agencies to the comically confused characters in a Cuban popular song:

“They themselves are like ‘Borondongo’…, Barnabas hit the CIA and the DEA or ICE, really not coordinated, even compete with each other …”.

"Borondongo" is a catchy tune, one that was covered by Celia Cruz, in which a character named Fuchilanga casts a voodoo spell on a village idiot named Burundanga, causing his feet to swell, after which a friend of Burundanga named Bernabé (Baranabas) hits Fuchilanga, and Borondongo, a friend of Fuchilanga, hits Bernabé, and so on. The word is a slang term for a hopelessly confused mess.

That might be a pretty fair analogy to the usual state of interagency cooperation, frankly, but it is still an insult and we are as entitled to be offended by it as Calderon is by our embassy's reporting cables. More entitled, since our cables are carefully substantiated by actual facts.

Speaking of which, if you are feeling bold enough to view those WikiLeaks cables that caused all this ruckus, I've placed a link to them below the warning.

CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION!

NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

View them [link redacted, due to somewhat exaggerated official concern], if you dare, but only on a personal computer, and then immediately forget what you saw.

U.S. Embassy in Mexico City Annexes a Street (For Mexico's Own Good)

Passport, the Foreign Policy magazine blog, has a story today on the ruckus the Major of Mexico City is kicking up over the U.S. embassy's practice of blocking access to a public street that adjoins the embassy property: Has the U.S. annexed a Mexico City street?

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard ... has taken up the cause of reopening Rio Danubio, a narrow one-way street off Paseo de la Reforma, the capital's main promenade modeled after the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

"The Embassy has not had, nor does it have, authorization to occupy public spaces," Ebrard told reporters. "They shouldn't be the ones who occupy the city with the aim of providing security."

Passport links to this story from the Miami Herald, which provided the above photo.

His Honor the Mayor may or may not know why the practice of blocking access to Rio Danubio started, since it goes way back to 1986, but it was, in fact, for the purpose of providing better security to the visa applicants who line up outside the embassy.

The section of Rio Danubio in question is a one-block stretch that runs between the embassy office building and the Marie Isabel Sheraton hotel. (In the photo, the embassy is just out of view on the right; the Sheraton is the building on the left.) In 1986, the embassy's consular section was located in a lower level of the embassy office building and visa applicants queued up along Rio Danubio to be admitted into the embassy, one small group at a time, via a side entrance that was roughly in the middle of the block. The street had a fair volume of vehicle traffic, some of it associated with a side entrance into the Sheraton, and it was not unusual for cars to be parked there.

In May 1986 a group calling itself the Commando Internacionalista Simon Bolivar parked a carbomb on Rio Danubio next to the hotel's side entrance. That put the bomb directly opposite the routine daily queue of visa applicants; clearly, it was an attempt to cause mass casualties. Fortunately, the bomb was discovered and rendered safe by the police (if I recall correctly, the bomb's crude homemade timer had failed), so no one was injured.

To protect against another such attack the U.S. Ambassador at the time, John Gavin, insisted that the local authorities allow the embassy to take control of Rio Danubio. They refused, until Ambassador Gavin applied pressure by shutting down all visa processing in Mexico City, after which they caved in pretty quickly.

Another Ambassador might not get away with shutting down visa processing - Gavin was an old Hollywood friend of President Reagan's, and he seemed serenely assured that he would remain Ambassador for so long as he wished no matter what kind of protests the government of Mexico and its allies in the U.S. made to the Secretary of State - but it's an option worth considering in case Mayor Marcelo Ebrard gets out of hand.