III Corps commander Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch announced that the proposed Army Compatible Use Buffer Zone, known as ACUB, would be placed on the back burner for at least a year and give him an opportunity to talk with all of the parties involved.
“I have decided to delay all discussions on the Army Compatible Use Buffer zone at Fort Hood,” Lynch said Friday. “We’re not talking about that anymore until about a year from now.”
Lynch said the timetable will allow him and III Corps staff to meet with Gatesville residents and political entities on the state and federal level before they can best decide how to proceed.
The ACUB program, which has been a bone of contention between Army planners and advocacy groups such as Our Land Our Lives, proposes that both parties work together to prevent commercial and residential development near some of the post’s training areas.
Title 10, Section 2684a of the United States Code gives the Department of Defense the authority to partner with non-federal governments or private organizations to create buffers around installations.
The Army implements this authority through the ACUB program, which is managed jointly by the offices of the assistant chief of staff for installation management and the director of training.
In an open letter to Fort Hood officials dated Nov. 20, 2007, Bob Maharg, president of Our Land Our Lives, said the post was not only not being a good neighbor, but failed to comply with Pentagon suggestions to work with affected landowners.
“We support the Army and Fort Hood, and we have worked for three years to get an acceptable program for a buffer,” Maharg said.
The property encompasses areas in excess of 91,000 acres near Fort Hood along the post’s northern fringes in southern Gatesville and the post’s southern limit adjacent to the Killeen/Fort Hood Municipal Airport.
Don Russell, vice president of Our Land Our Lives, is fine with things progressing slowly.
The organization has expressed disapproval of the ACUB initiative because they believe what the Army is doing is little more than a land grab.
“We have been open with what we have going on, and have been since day one,” Russell said. ‘The Army has not.”
Russell said the goal was to help landowners protect their legacies.
“We are not anti-buffer,” he said. “We’ve done more, at no cost to the government, than anybody or any organization, to get an effective buffer zone for Fort Hood, but it always gets reported that we are anti-buffer.”
Lynch said the plan overall is a good plan, specifically as it addresses the training needs of the Army, but the issue itself isn’t critical enough that he has to force the issue.
“We want to get everybody’s agreement and endorsement,” Lynch said. “It’s not my style to ram things home. It’s not what I do. I want to spend more time thinking about it and talking about it.”
bkirk@temple-telegram.com
