Commitment letters are out June 8, 2009

Every IMCOM employee should have received a four-page document that lays out the specific information on the reasons for IMCOM’s move to San Antonio and the options available to the workforce. Armed with that information, employees are asked to sign a letter of commitment that states their intent to relocate with IMCOM or leave the command by September 2011.

This latest milestone follows town hall meetings for the headquarters workforce at Fort Belvoir and Aberdeen Proving Ground on May 27, where IMCOM Human Resources experts and leaders laid out the plans, options and incentives for the phased relocation to San Antonio that is now underway. The command will reorganize in October of this year and begin learning to function under the new RIST-FST structure. Movement to San Antonio has begun and continues with about 150 people from IMCOM, AEC and FMWRC headquarters moving this summer. More early movers from the region headquarters will also be heading to San Antonio through the rest of this year.

The command is leasing space for about 750 workers to accommodate the vanguard of the existing workforce and new hires that will be brought on after members of the existing workforce have been placed. That space and possibly another leased facility will house the combined IMCOM headquarters until the command’s renovated campus on Fort Sam Houston is ready for occupancy in time to meet the BRAC deadline of September 2011.

The letter of commitment states their intent to move or not and to subsequently accept a specific job offer or not. There are four options: To volunteer to relocate, accept the offered job, and relocate when the time comes; to volunteer to relocate and subsequently decline the job offer; to volunteer to relocate, accept the job offer, then later decline to move; or to simply decline to relocate. Each choice has a set of associated consequences that are laid out in the town hall briefing slides on the transformation web site.

The headquarters town hall also introduced a package of incentives aimed at retaining as much of the experienced IMCOM workforce as possible. Some of those have been mentioned before, including the use of DNRP and paid house-hunting trips, and others. Now, the command is offering an 18 percent relocation bonus to appropriated fund employees who move. This also is spelled out more in the town hall slides.

Find the town hall slides, as well as the slides and original HR plan, as well as information about Texas living, at the transformation website.