By AP/KWMU
St. Louis, MO – More than 500 federal jobs that could have moved will stay in St. Louis County.
The General Services Administration announced Tuesday that it has secured 23.5 acres in north County (1829 Dunn Road) to build a new half-million square foot home for the National Archives' National Personnel Records Center.
"This is great news for Spanish Lake, Bellefontaine Neighbors, and St. Louis County," said Congressman Lacy Clay, in a statement.
The center is currently located in Overland, in the same massive building as the Army Reserve's Human Resources Command. That command is slated to move to Fort Knox, Ky. as part of the military's base realignment and closures.
The National Personnel Center houses both military and civil service records, but is perhaps best known for its military information, where more than 57 million records for veterans from the late 1890s through 2002 are housed.
Two years ago, the center released thousands of previously secret military records, including forms detailing what notables like Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac and Steve McQueen did during their service.
The Personnel Center was not affected by BRAC, however the National Archives was under orders to upgrade the building or move into a new one before 2009 to meet air conditioning and climate control standards for the records on file.
The building also was the site of a disasterous fire in 1973 that claimed more than a quarter of the military's records of U.S. veterans.
FED CUTS JOBS
With fewer people writing checks, the Federal Reserve is cutting more than 1,700 jobs around the country, including about 100 in St. Louis.
The Fed will consolidate most check-processing operations into four regional centers. The operations being trimmed in St. Louis will move to Atlanta over the next four years.
St. Louis is one of 14 processing centers that will lose jobs. The St. Louis Fed employs about 900 people; about 100 of them process checks. As a whole, the Fed processes about a third of all the checks written in the U.S.
When the changes are complete in 2011, there will only be about four or five people left over in St. Louis working on check processing, according to a spokesman.