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The holiday season is upon us once again, and Morgan and I wish each of you in the U.S. Army Garrison Stuttgart community a safe and happy holiday! We encourage all of you to enjoy this festive season, but always take safety into consideration.
Have a plan if your schedule involves social gatherings where alcohol will be served. Take care in your travels as weather conditions begin to impact our roads: slow down, keep a safe distance and arrive safely at your destination. Dress for the weather and ensure you can be seen.
The year 2009, like 2008, was a year of a tremendous positive growth and change, with continued renovations to our infrastructure and improvements to services throughout the community.
The challenges posed to our housing situation by an increase in our population were eased tremendously with the completion of an additional 186 housing units at Robinson Barracks. We were able to restore and renovate the Robinson Barracks Community Club, with improvements either finished or on the way for the bar and lounge, restaurant, bathroom facilities, and theater. Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs will also be offered in the facility. We will have a grand reopening of the club on Jan. 20, 2010, so we hope to see many of you there.
As for the increased population in our schools, Congress has appropriated funding for us to start construction of a new elementary school on the Böblingen Local Training Area across from Panzer Kaserne in 2011.
Also in 2009, U.S. European Command funded the addition of four temporary classrooms at Patch High School to help offset the increase in the student population. With this added capacity and the additional classrooms and kindergarten added in 2008, we are in good shape to provide a great educational environment for our kids, while we look forward to the construction of the new school. In 2010, we hope to have confirmation of additional requested funding so that we can build a much-needed new high school as well.
We were able to ease some of the challenges of parking on Patch Barracks with the renovation of Washington Square, which not only gave us an outstanding ceremonial field, but added 70 new parking spaces. Patch also saw the removal of an icon when the HQ, 5th Signal Command’s TV tower was dismantled and removed. The renovation of the Patch food court began Nov. 19, and soon community members will be able to enjoy a meal in a state-of-art mini-mall.
We broke ground on the 218-room hotel on Panzer Kaserne — by far the largest construction project in 2009. We plan to open the hotel in the spring or fall of 2010. In addition, the Panzer commissary received a new roof and construction of a new guard building at the Panzer main entrance is underway. The old wash rack is gone and the Panzer sports field will be lengthened so it meets official size requirements for football and soccer games. It will serve nicely as an alternative to Husky Field for our large and growing youth and high school sports programs.
Kelley Barracks underwent significant changes, including a renovation of most buildings, as Africa Command gets settled. The last un-renovated stairwell housing came out of renovation before the end of the year. We also broke ground on a new child development center and shoppette on Kelley, and we look forward to opening both facilities in February or March of 2010.
The garrison was able to open about 140 parking spaces on Kelley with the relocation of the abandoned and deployed service members’ vehicle lots from Kelley Barracks to the Stuttgart Army Airfield and the reduction in size of the Transportation Motor Pool. We will open another large parking area after we relocate the Transportation Motor Pool and its fleet of vehicles to the Stuttgart Army Air Field in 2010.
Many of these projects will be completed in the New Year, giving us all another reason to say “I’m Glad I Live Here.”
