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October 3, 2005
Guarded optimism | Bangor looks for modest gains in military facilities and employment, thanks in part to the BRAC process
By Michael P. Mccauley
The Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure process has brought mixed results to Maine. While the BRAC commissioners spared the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and voted to expand the Defense Finance and Accounting Service office in Limestone, they plan to remove both people and planes from the Brunswick Naval Air Station.
Things are decidedly upbeat, however, for three military units in Bangor, all of them based at or near Bangor International Airport. While the expansion of those units, in part due to the BRAC process, is hardly an economic blockbuster for the Queen City, military officials are thankful that the area, and its citizen-soldiers, are holding their own.
First, the BRAC Commission reversed an earlier decision to close the local Naval Reserve Center ˆ a move that was made to keep a reserve presence in Maine following the decision to close the Brunswick base. Then, the Maine Air National Guard's 101st Air Refueling Wing (also known as the Maineiacs) learned it would receive 10 new KC-135R tanker planes, perhaps as early as next year. Not to be outdone, the Maine Army National Guard has secured millions of dollars worth of improvement and building funds to upgrade its aviation and training facilities near the airport. (For more on BIA, see "Up and away," p. 30.)
The economic numbers associated with these changes are impressive at first blush. The annual operating, construction and other budgets at the 101st Air Refueling Wing come to almost $89 million ˆ not to mention the possibility of a new $26 million hangar in a couple of years. On the Army National Guard side, the value of new construction and salaries over the next several years could approach $77 million.
Though these numbers contain lots of zeroes, their actual impact on housing, shopping, tax collection and other economic activity in Bangor is not easy to gauge. Charlie Colgan, a public policy expert at the University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service, says these figures must be interpreted differently than other kinds of job data ˆ like those, for example, from Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. "Most of the employees there are, in fact, civilian employees who live in the region and essentially operate the equivalent of a manufacturing facility," he says.
The impact of the Maine Air and Army National Guard expansions in Bangor is likely to be more modest, he argues, "because many of the military who come in are on temporary detached duty or on training assignments. And they're there for relatively short periods of time, they don't affect the housing market very much [and] they don't bring their families, with rare exceptions."
On a wing and a prayer
In mid-September, President Bush endorsed, and sent on to Congress, the BRAC recommendations. Legislators have 45 days to decide whether to reject them entirely, something that has not happened in the prior three rounds of BRAC activity. Failing this sort of rejection, the recommendations will become law.
In its original report to the BRAC Commission, the Pentagon had recommended that 12 KC-135R tanker planes come to Bangor from bases in New York, Alabama and Mississippi. That news fueled initial reports that as many as 240 military and civilian jobs would be transferred to the Maineiacs' home base. But BRAC reduced the original figure and recommended that 10 new planes replace the unit's older, and noisier, fleet of KC-135Es ˆ only eight of which are used right now. Col. Don McCormack, chief of the joint staff for the Maine National Guard, says that given this development, the Bangor unit can expect about 30 to 40 new employees, a little more than half of them full-timers. The 101st Air Refueling Wing now employs about 860 people, with a little more than 40% of them on full-time status.
The Maineiacs faced two major obstacles on the way to getting new planes and personnel. First, several states filed lawsuits challenging the BRAC Commission's authority to shuffle airplanes and personnel from place to place, claiming the Pentagon has no right to disrupt units that are normally under the command of governors. This obstacle seems to have fallen by the wayside, however, when the Justice Department ruled in August that the commission's authority in this area should stand.
The second challenge came when the 101st Air Refueling Wing received a very low rating for National Guard tanker bases in a Department of Defense calculation called the Military Capability Index. What the Pentagon did in that ranking, says McCormack, "is [to base it on] aerial group refueling tracks" ˆ aerial pathways where tankers fuel other planes ˆ "that were training tracks developed over 40 years ago, some of them." In this case, he says, the index measured the proximity of refueling tracks to training bases located in the central part of the country. "They neglected to use the operational tracks that we use on a daily basis that run off the coast of Maine up into Nova Scotia," says McCormack.
In layman's terms, the Pentagon and BRAC failed to recognize that the 101st has processed more jet fuel since November 2001 than any other U.S. base, either active duty, National Guard, or reserve ˆ a clear indication of the base's importance to fighter planes that see action in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to McCormack. "So once we pointed out the data that showed they neglected to use those tracks," says McCormack, "the commission kind of threw away the Military Capability Index that was given to them initially." Now, it seems a good bet that the Maineiacs will get their new planes fairly soon, perhaps within a few months, according to McCormack.
On the Maine Army National Guard side, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Morton, who handles facilities engineering for the Guard, says the project with the biggest price tag, an Aviation Support Facility estimated to cost $32 million, is scheduled for completion this fall. "It basically is accommodating a transition the Army went through, moving from the Huey to the Black Hawk" helicopters, he says. This upgrade will enhance the Guard's ability to maintain choppers, adjust its infrastructure to meet present needs and position the unit for the future, he says.
The project that's garnered the most ink, however, is the proposed construction of a $28 million Regional Training Institute that would offer state-of-the-art instruction to Army National Guardsmen from Maine and neighboring states. "We have a number of our flight operations centered [in Bangor]," says Morton. "So obviously, if we were offering some kind of flight-related course work, the attendance would be high from the Bangor area." Updated field artillery courses would tend to attract Guardsmen located north of Bangor, he says, while those who specialize in engineering and other duties would likely come from farther south.
This RTI, as soldiers call it, would replace a training institute in Augusta that consists of a series of World War II-era wooden buildings, says Maj. Dwaine Drummond, the Guard's deputy director of facilities engineering. This older facility, says Drummond, would not enable the Guard to keep pace with 21st century training needs such as classes taught remotely by instructors in distant locations. The small size of the current classrooms also would be a barrier to attracting larger numbers of students in the future, he says.
Morton and Maj. Michael Backus, the Maine National Guard's public affairs specialist, add that the new center, also to be built near the airport, will look more like a modern educational facility than a set of traditionally drab Army-style buildings. "It should have a variety of classrooms, very similar to a college campus," says Backus, "with a student dormitory [and] cafeteria. It may also have athletic facilities as well."
The design process is scheduled begin shortly, with ground-breaking possible as early as the fall of 2007.
Add it up
With all the uncertainty that's surrounded the BRAC process, it's natural to wonder how solid the funding is for these projects. Money for the Army National Guard's Aviation Support Facility is already being spent and, according to Morton, funding for construction of the new Regional Training Institute is "a lock."
The story has been different for Air National Guard units because of the lawsuits mentioned above, along with some misunderstandings based on the different kinds of language used by the Pentagon and the BRAC Commission. In fact, it's possible that the downsizing of new aircraft estimates ˆ and job estimates ˆ at the 101st Air Refueling Wing can be explained by just such a snafu. Daniel Else, a national defense specialist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C., says part of the problem stems from concerns the commission had with the phrasing of DOD's initial closure and realignment recommendations. "So in the translation between the Department of Defense recommendations and the recommendations as they were finally voted upon by the BRAC Commission," he says, "there was a lot of potential for confusion in understanding exactly what the final recommendations stated."
However, according to Else, if BRAC has earmarked 10 new tanker planes and 30-40 personnel for Bangor's Maineiacs, as local officials contend, those are precisely the resources the base is likely to get.
Still, while the Air National Guard has a positive and symbiotic relationship with the city ˆ especially Bangor International Airport ˆ the impact of its expanded operations will likely be far less than if 240 new employees and their families moved to Bangor on a permanent basis. And while the Army National Guard's construction budget is impressive, it's not entirely accurate to say those funds will have a great impact, either. These projects, Colgan says, "will keep people [busy] in the commercial construction industry; it's one more job for them to do in the Bangor area. But, basically, if people weren't working on that particular job, they'd be working on other jobs."
Having said all this, Colgan would like nervous Mainers who were hoping for a larger impact to dispense with what he says is their typical assumption that "the world is coming to an end, we're closing up shop next year and the whole state's going to go out of business." Instead, he says, "a lot of little day-to-day things" that don't get much media attention are helping to keep the state's economy buoyant. Some of the proposed Maine National Guard expansions in Bangor don't qualify as big news, he says, but they are part of the day-to-day activities that keep local and state economies healthy.
Backus, the public affairs specialist, agrees. "These are very good news stories," he says. "The Maine National Guard is seeking to grow, to become more relevant and assist in any economic development within the communities. And we want to keep expanding, just like our communities do."
Morton and McCormack say Bangor can be thankful that its strategic transportation advantages helped bring these various projects into play. The advantage in the air is obvious for the Maineiacs, with Bangor's proximity to important refueling tracks for combat planes. The Maine Army National Guard also gets a boost from Bangor International Airport, in terms of its ability to bring soldiers here for training from neighboring states and, eventually, from across the country.
For civilians who are interested in the moral of this story, Colgan sums it up best. "The [economic] numbers here are not really all that big," he says, "but this is still positive economic news for Bangor, particularly in a time when a lot of other communities are facing major retrenchments in the military. To find not one, but two military operations either slightly expanding or significantly expanding is good news for the region ˆ and quite apart from getting caught up in the numbers."
Things are decidedly upbeat, however, for three military units in Bangor, all of them based at or near Bangor International Airport. While the expansion of those units, in part due to the BRAC process, is hardly an economic blockbuster for the Queen City, military officials are thankful that the area, and its citizen-soldiers, are holding their own.
First, the BRAC Commission reversed an earlier decision to close the local Naval Reserve Center ˆ a move that was made to keep a reserve presence in Maine following the decision to close the Brunswick base. Then, the Maine Air National Guard's 101st Air Refueling Wing (also known as the Maineiacs) learned it would receive 10 new KC-135R tanker planes, perhaps as early as next year. Not to be outdone, the Maine Army National Guard has secured millions of dollars worth of improvement and building funds to upgrade its aviation and training facilities near the airport. (For more on BIA, see "Up and away," p. 30.)
The economic numbers associated with these changes are impressive at first blush. The annual operating, construction and other budgets at the 101st Air Refueling Wing come to almost $89 million ˆ not to mention the possibility of a new $26 million hangar in a couple of years. On the Army National Guard side, the value of new construction and salaries over the next several years could approach $77 million.
Though these numbers contain lots of zeroes, their actual impact on housing, shopping, tax collection and other economic activity in Bangor is not easy to gauge. Charlie Colgan, a public policy expert at the University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service, says these figures must be interpreted differently than other kinds of job data ˆ like those, for example, from Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. "Most of the employees there are, in fact, civilian employees who live in the region and essentially operate the equivalent of a manufacturing facility," he says.
The impact of the Maine Air and Army National Guard expansions in Bangor is likely to be more modest, he argues, "because many of the military who come in are on temporary detached duty or on training assignments. And they're there for relatively short periods of time, they don't affect the housing market very much [and] they don't bring their families, with rare exceptions."
On a wing and a prayer
In mid-September, President Bush endorsed, and sent on to Congress, the BRAC recommendations. Legislators have 45 days to decide whether to reject them entirely, something that has not happened in the prior three rounds of BRAC activity. Failing this sort of rejection, the recommendations will become law.
In its original report to the BRAC Commission, the Pentagon had recommended that 12 KC-135R tanker planes come to Bangor from bases in New York, Alabama and Mississippi. That news fueled initial reports that as many as 240 military and civilian jobs would be transferred to the Maineiacs' home base. But BRAC reduced the original figure and recommended that 10 new planes replace the unit's older, and noisier, fleet of KC-135Es ˆ only eight of which are used right now. Col. Don McCormack, chief of the joint staff for the Maine National Guard, says that given this development, the Bangor unit can expect about 30 to 40 new employees, a little more than half of them full-timers. The 101st Air Refueling Wing now employs about 860 people, with a little more than 40% of them on full-time status.
The Maineiacs faced two major obstacles on the way to getting new planes and personnel. First, several states filed lawsuits challenging the BRAC Commission's authority to shuffle airplanes and personnel from place to place, claiming the Pentagon has no right to disrupt units that are normally under the command of governors. This obstacle seems to have fallen by the wayside, however, when the Justice Department ruled in August that the commission's authority in this area should stand.
The second challenge came when the 101st Air Refueling Wing received a very low rating for National Guard tanker bases in a Department of Defense calculation called the Military Capability Index. What the Pentagon did in that ranking, says McCormack, "is [to base it on] aerial group refueling tracks" ˆ aerial pathways where tankers fuel other planes ˆ "that were training tracks developed over 40 years ago, some of them." In this case, he says, the index measured the proximity of refueling tracks to training bases located in the central part of the country. "They neglected to use the operational tracks that we use on a daily basis that run off the coast of Maine up into Nova Scotia," says McCormack.
In layman's terms, the Pentagon and BRAC failed to recognize that the 101st has processed more jet fuel since November 2001 than any other U.S. base, either active duty, National Guard, or reserve ˆ a clear indication of the base's importance to fighter planes that see action in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to McCormack. "So once we pointed out the data that showed they neglected to use those tracks," says McCormack, "the commission kind of threw away the Military Capability Index that was given to them initially." Now, it seems a good bet that the Maineiacs will get their new planes fairly soon, perhaps within a few months, according to McCormack.
On the Maine Army National Guard side, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Morton, who handles facilities engineering for the Guard, says the project with the biggest price tag, an Aviation Support Facility estimated to cost $32 million, is scheduled for completion this fall. "It basically is accommodating a transition the Army went through, moving from the Huey to the Black Hawk" helicopters, he says. This upgrade will enhance the Guard's ability to maintain choppers, adjust its infrastructure to meet present needs and position the unit for the future, he says.
The project that's garnered the most ink, however, is the proposed construction of a $28 million Regional Training Institute that would offer state-of-the-art instruction to Army National Guardsmen from Maine and neighboring states. "We have a number of our flight operations centered [in Bangor]," says Morton. "So obviously, if we were offering some kind of flight-related course work, the attendance would be high from the Bangor area." Updated field artillery courses would tend to attract Guardsmen located north of Bangor, he says, while those who specialize in engineering and other duties would likely come from farther south.
This RTI, as soldiers call it, would replace a training institute in Augusta that consists of a series of World War II-era wooden buildings, says Maj. Dwaine Drummond, the Guard's deputy director of facilities engineering. This older facility, says Drummond, would not enable the Guard to keep pace with 21st century training needs such as classes taught remotely by instructors in distant locations. The small size of the current classrooms also would be a barrier to attracting larger numbers of students in the future, he says.
Morton and Maj. Michael Backus, the Maine National Guard's public affairs specialist, add that the new center, also to be built near the airport, will look more like a modern educational facility than a set of traditionally drab Army-style buildings. "It should have a variety of classrooms, very similar to a college campus," says Backus, "with a student dormitory [and] cafeteria. It may also have athletic facilities as well."
The design process is scheduled begin shortly, with ground-breaking possible as early as the fall of 2007.
Add it up
With all the uncertainty that's surrounded the BRAC process, it's natural to wonder how solid the funding is for these projects. Money for the Army National Guard's Aviation Support Facility is already being spent and, according to Morton, funding for construction of the new Regional Training Institute is "a lock."
The story has been different for Air National Guard units because of the lawsuits mentioned above, along with some misunderstandings based on the different kinds of language used by the Pentagon and the BRAC Commission. In fact, it's possible that the downsizing of new aircraft estimates ˆ and job estimates ˆ at the 101st Air Refueling Wing can be explained by just such a snafu. Daniel Else, a national defense specialist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C., says part of the problem stems from concerns the commission had with the phrasing of DOD's initial closure and realignment recommendations. "So in the translation between the Department of Defense recommendations and the recommendations as they were finally voted upon by the BRAC Commission," he says, "there was a lot of potential for confusion in understanding exactly what the final recommendations stated."
However, according to Else, if BRAC has earmarked 10 new tanker planes and 30-40 personnel for Bangor's Maineiacs, as local officials contend, those are precisely the resources the base is likely to get.
Still, while the Air National Guard has a positive and symbiotic relationship with the city ˆ especially Bangor International Airport ˆ the impact of its expanded operations will likely be far less than if 240 new employees and their families moved to Bangor on a permanent basis. And while the Army National Guard's construction budget is impressive, it's not entirely accurate to say those funds will have a great impact, either. These projects, Colgan says, "will keep people [busy] in the commercial construction industry; it's one more job for them to do in the Bangor area. But, basically, if people weren't working on that particular job, they'd be working on other jobs."
Having said all this, Colgan would like nervous Mainers who were hoping for a larger impact to dispense with what he says is their typical assumption that "the world is coming to an end, we're closing up shop next year and the whole state's going to go out of business." Instead, he says, "a lot of little day-to-day things" that don't get much media attention are helping to keep the state's economy buoyant. Some of the proposed Maine National Guard expansions in Bangor don't qualify as big news, he says, but they are part of the day-to-day activities that keep local and state economies healthy.
Backus, the public affairs specialist, agrees. "These are very good news stories," he says. "The Maine National Guard is seeking to grow, to become more relevant and assist in any economic development within the communities. And we want to keep expanding, just like our communities do."
Morton and McCormack say Bangor can be thankful that its strategic transportation advantages helped bring these various projects into play. The advantage in the air is obvious for the Maineiacs, with Bangor's proximity to important refueling tracks for combat planes. The Maine Army National Guard also gets a boost from Bangor International Airport, in terms of its ability to bring soldiers here for training from neighboring states and, eventually, from across the country.
For civilians who are interested in the moral of this story, Colgan sums it up best. "The [economic] numbers here are not really all that big," he says, "but this is still positive economic news for Bangor, particularly in a time when a lot of other communities are facing major retrenchments in the military. To find not one, but two military operations either slightly expanding or significantly expanding is good news for the region ˆ and quite apart from getting caught up in the numbers."
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