“Aw, come on you political hacks...solve the problem. Three miles...”
It is just how the contracting process goes, lots of factors go into determining how big the segment will be for a given contract. Last month, DoD awarded 46 miles on a single contract (West from El Paso past the Columbus Port of Entry), but that was a straight line in flat desert, overwhelmingly on Federal land, and all covered by the Roosevelt Reservation (Federal Government’s existing right of way).
These three miles are problematic, high traffic terrain, where the property issues are all ready to go, so they are moving out to get it done, while the issues are settled in other places.
About 400 private landowners need to be settled with in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, and the Roosevelt Reservation does not apply in Texas. Additionally, Congress (Henry Cuellar, (D) of Laredo and Los Zetas) inserted several restrictions into law for the Rio Grande Valley, which will further break up the segments there into smaller, less efficient chunks of work.
Despite the size of the segments, the bottom line is that we are off to the races this year for contracting border wall (individual segment completion generally takes a year or more after award). In 2017, we contracted for a total of 40 miles (just finishing up), 80 miles in 2018 (now getting underway in earnest across several segments).
But this year, with all the funding that the President has identified (four times as much as 2017 and 2018 combined) we are on track to contract a few hundred miles worth - the highest priority few hundred miles.
The high priority 14 mile primary barrier in San Diego has already made a big difference there (part of that first 40 miles). It was able to stop the caravan mob attacks last year, in the areas where it stood (it is now complete), and another 14 miles of 30 foot secondary barrier is now going in behind it. Those 28 miles (half from 2017, half from 2018), along with all the clearing, grading, roads, lighting, cameras, sensors and alarms in between; will transform the security of the biggest city on the border. That door will be buttoned up tight by Christmas.
As we work down the priority list through the first few hundred miles, we will already be addressing the areas where the great bulk of traffic now crosses. So this year’s contracting is where we are really engaged in the main battle of securing the border.
That is why the President pulled out the stops to get the funding this year, when the program was ready to scale up. In the first year especially, lots of long lead time preparations were needed. Designs needed to be tested and refined (prototypes), contract specifications had to be finalized for the designs. The whole border had to be analyzed for prioritizing segments and detailing the route. Legal issues of Leftist lawsuits and private property had to be addressed, Contract vehicles had to be established in accordance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and so on.
In the first year, we could not responsibly go out willy nilly building assorted barriers, without first carefully answering and communicating all the who, what, when, where, why and how questions. The comprehensive plan to establish full operational control of the border (five years, $25 billion, 1,100 miles of barrier, thousands more full time positions, and several technology programs) was submitted to Congress in March of 2018, and finally resubmitted after incorporating Congressional tweaks in December of 2018.
We are now ready programatically for full scale deployment (technology as well as barrier), and the President delivered the needed money bomb right on schedule.