April 17, 2006
Help wanted | A chat with Larry Conrad, director of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service center in Limestone, on the office's impending expansion after last year's BRAC decision
By Taylor Smith
After spending the past 37 years crunching numbers at military installations from Denver to Deutschland, Larry Conrad has finally found a place to call home. Since late 1994, Conrad has been posted at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, where he is director of the Maine office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the in-house accounting arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. "I'm a transplant now," he says of his Aroostook County residency. "I'm going to stay here, and I'm going to retire here."
Conrad, 61, can say that with much more certainty these days, thanks to the decision last year by the DOD's Base Realignment and Closure Commission to not only keep the Limestone office open ˆ despite a DOD recommendation that it be shuttered ˆ but also to significantly expand the operation. That announcement was welcome news to the office's 350 employees, who are gearing up to welcome up to 300 new co-workers in the next few years, as the DOD shuts down other DFAS facilities across the country.
Just shy of eight months after that announcement, Conrad is busy readying the office, which is housed in a former hospital, to hold those additional workers. Storage areas need to be converted to office space and workstations are en route to the facility. At the same time, Conrad says hiring is underway, and he's busy pitching the merits of northern Maine living to prospective employees.
Conrad took time out to chat with Mainebiz about keeping DFAS open and luring workers to Limestone. The following is an edited transcript.
Mainebiz: Where were you when you heard that the commission opted not to close your DFAS site?
Conrad: I was on an airplane. I was on my way back from a trip, and landed at the airport up here in Presque Isle about a half an hour after the announcement was made. Everybody told me immediately when I stepped off the plane. That's where I heard it ˆ at the Presque Isle airport. I'm a frequent flier, so they know me at the airport.
As soon as I got off the plane, I checked in with my office on my cell phone because I knew the commission was meeting. I guess it was my secretary who was the first one who told me, but everyone in the airport was telling me, too.
I imagine that was a nice piece of news.
I was thrilled. I headed straight for the Limestone Country Club, which is where the party was.
I think the thing that amazed me, and I've shared this with my colleagues at other sites who didn't have the same support, is that the day that the commission was meeting, we had all four members of the Maine congressional delegation ˆ as well as the governor ˆ at Loring all day long. They waited up here the entire day for that decision, either to congratulate us or console us. And I just found that incredible that you would have that kind of political support, spending an entire day just waiting for a decision that affected three-hundred-and-some jobs. My colleagues at other locations who never saw their congressional delegation through this process found that unbelievable.
So, now that the celebration is over, how are you preparing for changes at the facility?
There's a lot of activity up here. We've received the first increment of emergency BRAC funding, so we've got a number of workstations being shipped into us from DFAS San Bernardino [Calif.] and DFAS Lawton, Okla. About 125 of them total are scheduled to come up here during the week of April 3rd. Then we've got contracts in place for doing the electrical, power, telephone and LAN connectivity for those workstations. We've got the computers ordered and so forth, and we're anticipating that by the second half of May, we'll be ready for the influx of new folks that we're going to be hiring.
When will that start?
We've already begun the hiring process. We put out a press release a couple of weeks ago and let everybody know that we would be doing hiring and how they should go about submitting their resumes, which is all done online. It goes through what's called our delegating examining unit in Kansas City. They review the applications and provide us with a referral certificate of qualified candidates, in order of their qualifications.
We had some hiring going on already to get us up to our full authorization before the BRAC announcement, because we had not filled every position we had [open] at that point, not knowing whether we were going to stay open or not. But we just hired another 20 entry-level positions, and we're getting ready to select about another 68. And we're waiting for final approval of our staffing plan for how we want to be organized and staffed by fiscal year 2008. We need to get that approved so we then know what kinds of other positions and [pay] grades we can be hiring for above the entry level.
What does an entry-level employee do at DFAS?
An entry-level position is an accounting technician position. All of our work is with automated systems, so everything is pretty well done with computers. It's basically keeping all the accounting records, all the accounting reports and paying all of the contractors for all of the customers we support.
Currently, we support 72 Air Force bases and Air National Guard units. And when we expand and pick up additional workload, that number could go up to 146, and that would be all over the world ˆ all across the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Europe, Saudi Arabia. I think we'll cover 15 time zones by that point. Our customers span 11 time zones today.
Where do most of the DFAS workers come from?
When we first opened in 1995, there were some of us like myself, who came from other parts of the company and had been with DFAS earlier on. But the large majority of our accounting technicians, as well as many of our mid-level managers, were from the [local] area.
Today, we're at roughly 385 folks in the building, and that's about 80% hired from the local area and 20% hired from away. So a large majority of our workforce is from Aroostook County. And, a lot of the folks that came to us from other DOD activities were people who were coming home; they had grown up in this area, moved away and taken other jobs, and decided that it was a good time to come back to Aroostook County.
Will hiring locally be a problem in terms of finding a large enough pool of applicants?
We've never had a problem with qualified applicants in this area. We've had tremendous success with everybody we've hired from the local area. The work ethic, I think, is incredible. We're always at the bottom of the list in terms of sick-leave usage and turnover and those kinds of things. And those are lists where you want to be at the bottom and not the top.
The last time we asked the folks in Kansas City how many qualified applications they had for us out there ˆ and that was before we put out our press release that told people what we were doing ˆ there were still over 200 on the list. We picked up five new employees [in late March], and one of them is from MBNA in Presque Isle. She said a lot of her co-workers there are going to be putting in their applications since that office closed.
What are some of the job requirements for an entry-level DFAS position?
We require one year of experience in anything that relates to bookkeeping, payroll, accounting, keeping financial records, working in a bank, you name it. One year of any kind of generalized experience is all that's needed, and you can substitute a four-year college degree for that year of experience.
Will some of the new hires be coming from DFAS locations that were closed during the BRAC process?
Yes. We'll be picking up a number of those folks. I've got probably 35-40 folks already who have identified that they want to come up here from Orlando, Pensacola, Denver, Dayton ˆ from a number of places. So we will be picking up some folks. My best guess would be as many as 50 folks. Some will be entry level, but many of them will be at a higher level.
Is it tough to attract someone to Limestone?
We have a recruiting video, if you will, that was made by some of our people in house. That video has been sent out to all the site directors at the closing locations to be shared with their employees. We have promotional brochures; we've got a webpage called Limestone Bound available to everybody in DFAS, and it's got videos and testimonials from people who have moved here from other places.
And we'll also be going to what I call "job fairs" at some of the closing sites, where representatives from the five remaining sites will be there to talk to employees one-on-one and help answer their questions. I think we've got about five places that we've identified to go to based on folks who've indicated that they're interested in moving up here. If nobody said they wanted to come to Limestone, we wouldn't go.
Conrad, 61, can say that with much more certainty these days, thanks to the decision last year by the DOD's Base Realignment and Closure Commission to not only keep the Limestone office open ˆ despite a DOD recommendation that it be shuttered ˆ but also to significantly expand the operation. That announcement was welcome news to the office's 350 employees, who are gearing up to welcome up to 300 new co-workers in the next few years, as the DOD shuts down other DFAS facilities across the country.
Just shy of eight months after that announcement, Conrad is busy readying the office, which is housed in a former hospital, to hold those additional workers. Storage areas need to be converted to office space and workstations are en route to the facility. At the same time, Conrad says hiring is underway, and he's busy pitching the merits of northern Maine living to prospective employees.
Conrad took time out to chat with Mainebiz about keeping DFAS open and luring workers to Limestone. The following is an edited transcript.
Mainebiz: Where were you when you heard that the commission opted not to close your DFAS site?
Conrad: I was on an airplane. I was on my way back from a trip, and landed at the airport up here in Presque Isle about a half an hour after the announcement was made. Everybody told me immediately when I stepped off the plane. That's where I heard it ˆ at the Presque Isle airport. I'm a frequent flier, so they know me at the airport.
As soon as I got off the plane, I checked in with my office on my cell phone because I knew the commission was meeting. I guess it was my secretary who was the first one who told me, but everyone in the airport was telling me, too.
I imagine that was a nice piece of news.
I was thrilled. I headed straight for the Limestone Country Club, which is where the party was.
I think the thing that amazed me, and I've shared this with my colleagues at other sites who didn't have the same support, is that the day that the commission was meeting, we had all four members of the Maine congressional delegation ˆ as well as the governor ˆ at Loring all day long. They waited up here the entire day for that decision, either to congratulate us or console us. And I just found that incredible that you would have that kind of political support, spending an entire day just waiting for a decision that affected three-hundred-and-some jobs. My colleagues at other locations who never saw their congressional delegation through this process found that unbelievable.
So, now that the celebration is over, how are you preparing for changes at the facility?
There's a lot of activity up here. We've received the first increment of emergency BRAC funding, so we've got a number of workstations being shipped into us from DFAS San Bernardino [Calif.] and DFAS Lawton, Okla. About 125 of them total are scheduled to come up here during the week of April 3rd. Then we've got contracts in place for doing the electrical, power, telephone and LAN connectivity for those workstations. We've got the computers ordered and so forth, and we're anticipating that by the second half of May, we'll be ready for the influx of new folks that we're going to be hiring.
When will that start?
We've already begun the hiring process. We put out a press release a couple of weeks ago and let everybody know that we would be doing hiring and how they should go about submitting their resumes, which is all done online. It goes through what's called our delegating examining unit in Kansas City. They review the applications and provide us with a referral certificate of qualified candidates, in order of their qualifications.
We had some hiring going on already to get us up to our full authorization before the BRAC announcement, because we had not filled every position we had [open] at that point, not knowing whether we were going to stay open or not. But we just hired another 20 entry-level positions, and we're getting ready to select about another 68. And we're waiting for final approval of our staffing plan for how we want to be organized and staffed by fiscal year 2008. We need to get that approved so we then know what kinds of other positions and [pay] grades we can be hiring for above the entry level.
What does an entry-level employee do at DFAS?
An entry-level position is an accounting technician position. All of our work is with automated systems, so everything is pretty well done with computers. It's basically keeping all the accounting records, all the accounting reports and paying all of the contractors for all of the customers we support.
Currently, we support 72 Air Force bases and Air National Guard units. And when we expand and pick up additional workload, that number could go up to 146, and that would be all over the world ˆ all across the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Europe, Saudi Arabia. I think we'll cover 15 time zones by that point. Our customers span 11 time zones today.
Where do most of the DFAS workers come from?
When we first opened in 1995, there were some of us like myself, who came from other parts of the company and had been with DFAS earlier on. But the large majority of our accounting technicians, as well as many of our mid-level managers, were from the [local] area.
Today, we're at roughly 385 folks in the building, and that's about 80% hired from the local area and 20% hired from away. So a large majority of our workforce is from Aroostook County. And, a lot of the folks that came to us from other DOD activities were people who were coming home; they had grown up in this area, moved away and taken other jobs, and decided that it was a good time to come back to Aroostook County.
Will hiring locally be a problem in terms of finding a large enough pool of applicants?
We've never had a problem with qualified applicants in this area. We've had tremendous success with everybody we've hired from the local area. The work ethic, I think, is incredible. We're always at the bottom of the list in terms of sick-leave usage and turnover and those kinds of things. And those are lists where you want to be at the bottom and not the top.
The last time we asked the folks in Kansas City how many qualified applications they had for us out there ˆ and that was before we put out our press release that told people what we were doing ˆ there were still over 200 on the list. We picked up five new employees [in late March], and one of them is from MBNA in Presque Isle. She said a lot of her co-workers there are going to be putting in their applications since that office closed.
What are some of the job requirements for an entry-level DFAS position?
We require one year of experience in anything that relates to bookkeeping, payroll, accounting, keeping financial records, working in a bank, you name it. One year of any kind of generalized experience is all that's needed, and you can substitute a four-year college degree for that year of experience.
Will some of the new hires be coming from DFAS locations that were closed during the BRAC process?
Yes. We'll be picking up a number of those folks. I've got probably 35-40 folks already who have identified that they want to come up here from Orlando, Pensacola, Denver, Dayton ˆ from a number of places. So we will be picking up some folks. My best guess would be as many as 50 folks. Some will be entry level, but many of them will be at a higher level.
Is it tough to attract someone to Limestone?
We have a recruiting video, if you will, that was made by some of our people in house. That video has been sent out to all the site directors at the closing locations to be shared with their employees. We have promotional brochures; we've got a webpage called Limestone Bound available to everybody in DFAS, and it's got videos and testimonials from people who have moved here from other places.
And we'll also be going to what I call "job fairs" at some of the closing sites, where representatives from the five remaining sites will be there to talk to employees one-on-one and help answer their questions. I think we've got about five places that we've identified to go to based on folks who've indicated that they're interested in moving up here. If nobody said they wanted to come to Limestone, we wouldn't go.
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