Since it was announced that U.S. Space Command would be relocated to Huntsville, members of Colorado’s congressional delegation have criticized the move. Despite that criticism, most of the review process has approved relocating to the Rocket City.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Air Force released its draft Environmental Impact Study, which said that moving the U.S. Space Command to Redstone Arsenal would have “no significant impacts on the human or natural environment.”
Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said on Alabama Public Television’s “Capitol Journal” Friday that he was still confident the U.S. Space Command would come to Huntsville.
“We feel very confident with it,” Battle said. “It’s one of those things, Colorado Springs, we understand their anguish over this, but we’re still going to be working with Colorado Springs. There’s a couple of commands that we share with them. We’ll still be sharing with them when Space Command comes in.”
Battle said he understood those in Colorado who were upset at the relocation of the Space Command but reiterated that Huntsville was the best place in the country to put it.
“We have worked really hard,” he continued. “It was a competition, and we won the competition, but we understand our friends in Colorado Springs wanted to hang on to that. We wouldn’t have been competing for it if we didn’t think it was very valuable, that we could do a good job with it, and by doing a good job with it doing a good job for the nation, and that was one of the most important things to look at.”
Battle highlighted the many different factors that proved Huntsville was the best place in America for it to be located.
“It comes down to the quality of life,” he argued. “It comes down to the cost of living. It comes to who has a better engineering base. We have more engineers and great professionals per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. It comes down to who has the research park and is able to do the research and development on it. It comes down to the idea of cost efficiency, a classic example is the FBI is going to move FBI personnel down to Redstone Arsenal, they’re getting the same paycheck here that they get in Washington, D.C. and their paycheck goes a lot further here. There’s housing prices. If you compare the housing prices to somebody on the east and west coast coming here, they’re probably getting two times the house for the amount of money that they’d be spending on the east and west coast. All of those factors come together.”
The mayor said this move would be great for the future of the country as a whole.
“Huntsville will be the best place for Space Command to be,” he argued, “and we will be able to provide years and years of protection for the people of the United States of America in doing that.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.