BENS' Lessons For Communities
Communities that may be affected by future closures can duplicate these success stories by positioning themselves now for life without a base. The critical first challenge is accepting that a base is not a permanent entitlement. Imagining how to match or exceed the economic benefits the current base produces can be aided by the experiences of more than 200 communities affected by earlier BRAC actions. The Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment maintains an active log. Local leaders contemplating the future of their base and their community should follow a multi-step approach:
- Build regional consensus for an agreed vision of the future. Broad agreement on where the community wants to go can help eliminate turf battles and enable the base community to work more efficiently on transition.
- Create a local redevelopment authority to implement the vision. Establishing a lead authority helps the community speak with a single voice as it talks to the private sector and government officials about revitalization.
- Evaluate base capabilities to immediately enhance the value of underutilized assets. Improving base performance saves money now and is always good for America while also laying the ground for quick conversion to civilian business operations if the base is closed.
- Learn from others’ experience. Studying the experience of other base communities can help a community identify its own strengths, enable it to borrow from what others did right and avoid what others did wrong.
- Lobby for assistance, not against closure. The decision to keep a base or to close it will be based on military value not political horse-trading. Instead of spending resources resisting closure, the community will be better off working for maximum transition assistance. Congress can provide more help here, too, by making available many of the economic redevelopment tools formerly available only to communities of a base already selected for closure.
Some will say Congress has dealt a tough hand to military base communities, and many local leaders will insist on hiring lobbyists to save the base. Rarely is there a more unproductive expenditure of local tax dollars. In fact, fewer than 15 percent of the Pentagon’s original closure and realignment recommendations have been altered by the Base Closure Commission—and in those cases the recommendations are mostly revised, not reversed. One-in-seven odds that a closure decision can be reversed might indicate that replacing lobbying with transition planning is a better use of resources.
Experience shows that base closure communities don’t have to draw an inside straight to wind up with economic benefits. Rather, they should use the run-up to the 2005 BRAC round to design a new economic strategy, recalling the counsel of Henry Ford that, “getting ready is the secret of success.”
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