BRAC Attack

ennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell says he doesn't want to come back to Letterkenny Army Depot, his state's largest military base, anytime soon. If he did it would be because the Pentagon wanted to close the sprawling installation in rural, south central Pennsylvania.

Rendell recently toured the depot's noisy, grease-stained warehouses, where equipment ranging from Patriot missile radars to latrines gets overhauled by 1,200 Defense Department workers and about 700 contract employees. Those welders, machinists and mechanics pump $242 million into the local economy, earning annual wages averaging $45,217-three times the typical salary in the region. The governor made the trip to support efforts to keep those high-paying federal jobs as the Pentagon considers shutting down excess military bases.

Letterkenny is one of the most vulnerable bases in the country. It has been downsized before, and the Defense Department has made it clear it would rather give repair work to private firms.

"You're the best evidence, the best reason we have for keeping Letterkenny running and expanding here," Rendell told a crowd of about 100 workers, clad in baseball caps and blue jeans, who mingled with business-suited politicians in Building 350's rambling machine shop.

Rendell called it "truly remarkable" that workers had cut overhauls on armored Humvees from 21 months to nine days during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He noted that lean manufacturing techniques, popularized by Japanese car maker Toyota, improved productivity by as much 50 percent.

Debbie Witherspoon, president of the local National Federation of Federal Employees union, which represents about 600 depot workers, says Letterkenny has lost about 4,000 jobs since she began working there in 1980. Witherspoon wonders whether the governnor's visit will matter in Washington. "There are no guarantees, and base closings are truly political," she says.

Installations across the country are selling themselves as vital to national defense as the Pentagon weighs which of the military's 425 domestic bases-as many as one in four-to close in 2005. It will be the first time since the 1990s that Defense will discard bases. As in the past, an independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission will review the Pentagon's choices and make final recommendations for approval by the president and Congress in the fall.

Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment Raymond DuBois, says every base will be reviewed regardless of local efforts to keep them open. "They're being treated equally. There are no favorites," DuBois said. "It's going to be driven by military value."

After Rendell's pep talk to Letterkenny workers, the governor met off base with politicians and union leaders to discuss strategies for keeping the facility open. Local officials sported buttons that said, "Staying Alive in '05." Ironically, the meeting was in a former Letterkenny warehouse that was converted into a private conference center after thousands of jobs were stripped during a realignment in 1995.

Michael Ross, president of the Franklin County Area Development Corp., a community group devoted to economic growth in the Letterkenny region, says BRAC 2005 should be viewed as an opportunity to bring jobs back to the area through partnerships with contractors or by winning work from other bases. After losing about 16,000 jobs (second only to military-rich California) in four BRAC rounds between 1988 and 1995, Ross says the state realizes that military bases can have the same economic impact as a Fortune 100 corporation.

Indeed, in 2004 and 2005, Pennsylvania will spend $5 million on shoring up its bases and hiring top-flight lobbyists in Washington to defend them. Community leaders at Letterkenny received $75,000 to train workers in repairing new weapon systems and to study depot expansion.

The governor has nearly a dozen more installations to visit. But he could end up back at Letterkenny this year. "If we're on the BRAC list I'll come back," he says.