Touching All the Bases

Late last year, Houston County, Ga., got a notice from the Environmental Protection Agency that it would be on a list of more than 400 counties nationwide that did not meet Clean Air Act standards. As a result, the central Georgia county faced severe restrictions on attracting work, including new airplanes to Robins Air Force Base, until it reduced its pollution levels.

The Georgia congressional delegation and state and local officials immediately set out to reverse the EPA's decision. They conducted their own analyses of pollutants, met with federal regulatory officials and lobbied the head of the EPA to be taken off the list by saying the pollution came from a coal-burning plant in neighboring Bibb County.

They said making the list could hurt the base in next year's round of the military base realignment and closure process. Robins AFB includes the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center and has a civilian, contractor and military workforce of 25,500.

"Air quality nonattainment is the single largest threat to Robins for BRAC 2005," Georgia's senators and the congressmen representing Houston County wrote EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt in late March. "Such status and associated limitations [could be] part of the rationale for choosing not to realign operations to the base, or even worse, closure of the installation."

By this time next year, a nine-member independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission will be making final recommendations to Congress and the president about which bases should be closed or consolidated.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said the armed forces have as much as 24 percent excess infrastructure and that billions of dollars could be saved by closing or realigning some of Defense's 425 domestic installations. In four past BRAC rounds, held in the late 1980s and 1990s, Defense closed 97 bases throughout the country and has saved more than $15 billion overall and $6.5 billion in reduced operating costs annually.

Indeed, Georgia is only one example of the many states and local communities that are seeking any advantage they can to keep military facilities open.

Arizona has passed laws to ease crowding around bases. Florida has spent millions of dollars upgrading roads and infrastructure surrounding them. Pennsylvania is retraining workers to attract new jobs to its bases. Western states with huge training ranges have joined forces to promote their interests. Rhode Island has allied itself with industry to protect its naval facilities.

Every state and community with a military installation seems to have an organization or consultant working to keep its bases open.

Most states and communities have been lukewarm about congressional attempts to delay base closings until 2007. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Phil Browning, executive director of the Georgia Military Affairs Coordinating Committee in Atlanta, says his state is "indifferent," and the 13 bases will be ready for BRAC whenever it happens.

William McDonough, president of the Seacoast Shipyard Association, which is trying to save the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire, is more pointed when asked about a possible two-year delay, saying it would only allow "consultants to get richer and richer."

Some installations might be in as good a position now as they have been in recent years to fend off a shutdown. Military depots, the services' repair centers, often have been viewed as candidates for closure or consolidation because of costly overhead and aging civilian workforces. The war in Iraq, however, has generated a huge demand for spare parts and repairs to equipment, forcing depots to hire workers and add shifts after years of downsizing.

Army Lt. Gen. Claude Christianson, deputy chief of staff for logistics, says the depots are gaining respect as a "powerful military capability."

Indeed, the Army's five depots have increased spending and production by 25 percent this year. The depot workforce will grow by 7 percent, from 13,526 to 14,517 uniformed, civilian and contract workers this fiscal year, according to the Army Materiel Command.

Other states and communities, meanwhile, are hoping to gain work from the Pentagon's ongoing repositioning of global forces. Officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense say the movement of forces may take several years, but they expect key decisions will be made in time to influence next year's BRAC.

Texas and California, the states with the most military bases, could gain forces if troops are moved back to the United States from Germany or Korea.

In Georgia, meanwhile, Robins backers already have a BRAC victory. When the EPA's final list of counties with polluted air came out in April, Houston County had been taken off.