The US Federal Claims Court has decided that the Air Force must pay companies that built homes on the former Lowry Air Force Base in Denver around $9 million—the amount it cost them to clean up asbestos left behind when the service demolished buildings on the Lowry redevelopment site. The Rocky Mountain News reports that the Denver law firm representing the homebuilders during their two-year legal battle says the court’s decision provided the “first judicial decision in the country” addressing Section 330 of the 1993 National Defense Authorization Act, which offers a “broad indemnity from the military to parties who purchase former military properties for all costs incurred as a result of environmental contamination caused by the military’s historic activities on the property.”
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t see great value in trying to break the Sentinel ICBM program off as a separate budget item the way the Navy has with its ballistic-missile submarine program, saying such a move wouldn’t create any new money for the Air Force to spend on other…