Open To Closure

hen the Defense Department closed the Mare Island Shipyard in Vallejo, Calif., in 1996, Gary Dent, a supervisor of shipfitters at the Navy facility, worried about where he would find work. Then in his mid-40s and with children still at home, Dent was too young to retire, and after more than two decades of federal service, he didn't want to try to start a new career.

Like most employees at the shipyard, Dent became a regular visitor to the base's personnel office, poring over listings of government jobs at other military bases. But he found his next job when a former shipyard colleague, who worked a few hours south at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., called and told him about an opening there for an education analyst.

For Dent, networking turned out to be the key factor in getting a new job. "We had a tight community. Once you are somewhere for 20 years, you know everybody," he says. Today, Dent still works at the Monterey installation, and with his years of service, he can retire whenever he wants.

Like Dent, thousands of Defense Department managers are facing similar dilemmas and seeking any edge as the Pentagon prepares to close or realign dozens of bases for the first time in a decade. At the same time, many of these managers, along with higher-level executives, are helping to keep their installations off the hit list. Current and former Defense officials say leaders can take several steps before, during and after base closings are announced to help themselves, their employees and their operations survive-and even thrive-during tumultuous times.

Understanding the Process

Managers say the first step to surviving is understanding how the base realignment and closure process works. Knowing how bases are picked and the kinds of units the Pentagon wants to keep open can help managers position their installations to stay open, or even gain work.

For the past year, the Pentagon and the military services have been working to come up with a list of bases designated for closure or realignment, to be published in May 2005. A nine-member independent BRAC commission, appointed by the president and approved by Congress, will spend the summer holding hearings on the Pentagon's recommendations, crunching numbers before coming up with its own final list. In September, the list will go to the president and Congress, who must accept or reject it in its entirety.

BRAC observers say that if base managers want to influence the outcome of that process, their best chance to act is before the Pentagon finalizes its list. In the past four BRAC rounds, about 85 percent of the bases that the Pentagon wanted closed also were selected by the commission and eventually approved by Congress and the president.

Pentagon leaders repeatedly have said the upcoming BRAC will be far different from the four held in the late 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in the closure of nearly 100 domestic military installations-saving about $7 billion annually. Unlike past rounds, the Pentagon does not simply view the upcoming BRAC as a way to cut costs, but as a means to create joint bases and combine work that is common across the military services.

"It's fully recognized and fully embraced by all the senior leaders that this is an enormously valuable management tool to not just transform the infrastructure but also transform where and how we do business," says Raymond DuBois, who recently resigned as deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment, but will remain an adviser on BRAC.

For example, DuBois points out that each of the military services has personnel operations at multiple bases. He says BRAC decision-makers not only are weighing how to consolidate such operations at fewer bases, but also whether it makes sense for the services to combine their personnel efforts. He says this BRAC round could lead to more realignments and fewer closings.

Last March, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a report to Congress that underscored just how much extra space Defense believes exists at military bases and what might be cut or combined. The report found 24 percent excess capacity across the military. No individual bases were named, but the report highlighted extra space at: Army research, testing, development and evaluation facilities and laboratories (62 percent); Navy inventory control facilities (60 percent); Air Force training classrooms (45 percent); and Defense Logistics Agency distribution depots (20 percent).

Currently, the Pentagon is in the process of collecting mounds of data from military installations, ranging from questions about the size of installations to the average age of their civilian employees. During the next few months, the data will be analyzed as the Pentagon puts together its recommendations for the BRAC commission.

Getting Ready

Managers and executives who have been through the base-closing process stress the importance of providing complete, accurate and timely data to decision-makers to show all of a base's strengths and capabilities. In 1995, Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., was initially marked for realignment, but community leaders convinced the Air Force to reverse that recommendation after showing it was based on inaccurate and incomplete data that overstated the savings from moving work.

"I can't control the process, but I can control the information that goes into it," says Boyd Sartin, BRAC program manager at the Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas. Red River officials emphasize they have nearly quadrupled the total employee hours worked at the depot between 2001 and this year due to repair and maintenance on vehicles from the war in Iraq.

Managers say the biggest challenge in the months leading up to BRAC is motivating employees as rumors swirl that they will lose their jobs in a realignment or closure. "Once rumors get out, it affects a lot of people in the workforce," says Leonard Lew, a retired manager who worked at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif., prior to its closing in 2001.

Alvin Anderson, a former human resources manager at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia who now oversees submarine refuelings there, says the threat of base closings makes it harder to hire employees. "People don't see government work as so secure," says Anderson, recalling that one applicant asked him about the possibility of BRAC layoffs fives times during an interview.

Anderson says he never guarantees that the facility won't close, but he does point out to job candidates that it's unlikely the Navy would close its largest shipyard on the East Coast. Other managers say they, too, stress a base's strengths in interviews with prospective employees, but also emphasize that it takes several years to close a base and in the interim, most employees could find jobs at other Defense or federal installations.

Patrick O'Brien, director of the Pentagon's Office of Economic Adjustment, which assists communities in redeveloping bases after they are closed, says military managers should not only consider how to stay off the closure list, but also determine how their organization would handle more work if it stayed open. Helen Gough, deputy garrison commander of Fort Riley, Kan., says the base already has gained several thousand Army troops temporarily as part of the global repositioning of forces. They could move there permanently as a result of BRAC decisions. Gough says the base is now drawing up contingency plans for building facilities and is weighing the potential impact on the base's roads, parking lots and utilities. "There are a lot of moving parts that our master planners must take into consideration," she says.

Dealing With It

Diane Disney, the Pentagon's civilian personnel chief during the Clinton administration, says managers whose bases are being closed often go through the stages of grief similar to those people face when a loved one dies. First, there's denial that their base could be closed. Then anger typically leads to bargaining over ways to delay closure. Eventually, managers accept that their bases are being shut down. "Managers need to recognize that both employees and communities are going through this," she says.

Lew recalls difficulty in keeping workers motivated at McClellan Air Force Base once the base was officially marked for closure. He stressed to employees that the Air Force still relied on them to keep its planes flying. He says there was no drop-off in the depot's performance even after the closure was announced.

"The more information you can give them, the better off they will be," says Homero Salazar, a manager who relocated to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City in 1995 after Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, closed. Holding town hall-style meetings with employees, publishing Web sites and newsletters with job information, working with labor unions and management organizations, and making career counselors available are the best bets for keeping employees informed once the BRAC list is unveiled, managers say.

Disney says it also is important to remind employees that the Defense Department will likely find work at other bases for those who want it. In past BRAC rounds, Disney notes, Defense workers had a better than 50 percent chance of finding jobs through a priority placement program that gives employees at bases being closed first crack at other Defense jobs.

Ellen Tunstall, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for civilian personnel policy, says the Defense civilian workforce was cut by nearly 40 percent between 1989 and 2002 as result of BRACs and downsizing that followed the end of the Cold War. But less than 10 percent of those employees were laid off. She says Defense still has the tools available to prevent large-scale layoffs again, including the priority placement program, early retirement offers and retraining programs.

Tunstall says Defense's aging civilian workforce-more than half of all civilians are eligible to retire within the next five years-also would help limit the number of pink slips. "If we can encourage senior people to leave and create and keep jobs for those young middle managers, in-terns and trainees that we have spent a lot of investment in hiring and training [in recent years], then that could be a benefit too," she adds.

Indeed, Tunstall says she's worried that even with BRAC under way, Defense may lose too many employees to retirement and have to offer some workers incentives to stay on the job. She called personnel rules during BRAC a "Rubik's Cube that you twist and turn to make the best fit for each installation, depending upon what the changes are."

Sartin, who saw 600 jobs move out of Red River Army Depot after the 1995 BRAC, says that during the process of realignment, managers should move as quickly as possible to reassign work or eliminate excess property. Until a BRAC restructuring is complete, he notes, installations generally are prohibited from building facilities and buying much equipment. For example, from 1995 to 2001, as Red River transferred work to Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania and land to a community redevelopment agency, the depot was only able to make $7 million in infrastructure improvements and had no money for new construction.

Sartin says the most expensive part of a base realignment is paying for early retirement, retraining and other incentives for workers who are laid off. Red River spent about $23 million on its last BRAC with $13 million going toward personnel, $7 million to shift equipment and $3 million for managing the process.

Defense managers who have been through the BRAC process and landed on their feet at other facilities say they've learned to remain vigilant. "Before, I didn't think they'd ever close us," says Dent. "Now I know they can."