Military towns brace for base cutbacks

In the early 1950s, when the Navy re-opened a 1500-acre, war-time air base in Brunswick, Maine, residents of the small, coastal community were less than thrilled. The ensuing influx of hundreds of sailors and airmen, along with the resumption of flight operations, drew a less-than-welcome response from the quiet, picturesque town.

Relations became so strained, a former naval officer at the base recalls, the commanding officer and town officials only communicated through intermediaries. But the base commander eventually hit on a plan to win over public opinion. He ordered that all base personnel be paid in cash — in $2 bills.

“Once those $2 bills started circulating through the town, things started getting a lot better as far as relations went,” recalled Rick Tetrev, a former officer at the Brunswick Naval Air Station, who is now a member of a local task force to save the base from closure.

Now, as the Pentagon begins another round of military base closings, no one needs to be reminded of the economic benefits these facilities provide to local communities. Communities targeted in the latest round of closures will begin the difficult struggle of lobbying to keep their local base open. If they fail at that, they'll begin the even more difficult task of coming up with alternate uses for these sites to replace the thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of revenue that will be lost.

On Friday, the Pentagon recommended that the Brunswick Naval Air Station be "re-aligned," cutting about 2,400 jobs — or about half of the base's military and civilian workforce. While Brunswick avoided the worst-case scenario of a closure recommendation, it's not hard to see why the Pentagon considers it ripe for downsizing. As a mainstay of Cold War military strategy, the base was tasked with keeping an eye on the movements of Russian submarines in the North Atlantic. It's mainstay was the P-3 Orion, a long-range, four-engine turboprop designed 47 years ago.

But Brunswick is now the last active-duty military airfield in New England; the next closest is McGuire Air Force Base in southern New Jersey. State and local officials trying save the base argue that it is still ideally suited for the modern mission of coastal surveillance to support the Department of Homeland Security.

"It's beyond the realm of reality to understand how they could recommend the only remaining active-duty airfield in the Northeast to be realigned" at a time when the nation needs to bolster homeland security, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said Friday.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said at least some of the P-3 Orion squadrons would be relocated to the naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla.

Officials working to head off the cutbacks — the state’s second largest employer —  have seen this movie before: Brunswick has been on the list of potential cutbacks and closures during each of the previous rounds in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995.  Those four rounds of base closings eliminated some 20 percent of U.S. military facilities, cutting annual defense spending by about $7 billion a year for net savings of roughly $29 billion so far.

But taxpayer savings have exacted a price from the 73 communities that lost bases. Some 14 years after the process began, only 72 percent of the estimated of 130,000 jobs lost have been recovered, according to a January, 2005 report by the General Accountability Office. Of 62 communities studied in the report, 30 percent had unemployment rates that were higher than the national average.

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