For more than a year, the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) Garrison has been exploring possible agreements with local government agencies that will lower costs for both parties.
The mechanism is called an Intergovernmental Support Agreement (IGSA), and it has been in use within the Department of the Army since first piloted in 1998.
Since then, there have been well over 100 formalized IGSAs approved throughout the Department of the Army. At Fort Riley, Kansas, for instance, the garrison and a local government share a contract to acquire salt and sand to treat icy roads in the winter, and the garrison allows both to be stored in a disused building on post.
“The efficiencies that get created doing it together means a little lower price for both partners,” said Ken Musselwhite, YPG Garrison Manager. “It has to be mutually beneficial in order to do it.”
On January 4, Musselwhite and Yuma International Airport Director Gladys Brown signed an IGSA between the YPG Garrison and the Yuma County Airport Authority for facility and infrastructure construction and maintenance as officials from both entities looked on.
The process to reach the agreement took more than a year, culminating with the approval of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Housing and Partnerships last month. Estimates project the 10-year agreement could save the YPG Garrison in excess of $800,000 per year.
“We are able to utilize local contractors and those relationships we’ve built over the years through our federal and state projects,” said Brown. “This is most definitely a good move not just for the Airport Authority, but also for a lot of our local contractors.”
The agreement has the potential to save time in addition to money, but doesn’t prevent the garrison from contracting with other entities for construction and maintenance.
“They are a source for us to go to,” said Ben Rix, chief of YPG’s Plans, Analysis, and Integration Office. “We have multiple sources we can go with: if they come in better and cheaper, we go with them.”
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