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George Gongora/Caller-Times file
ARRIVAL: The USS Pelican arrives at Naval Station Ingleside in 2002. The base is one of the installations a regional task force will attempt to protect from the next round of base closures in 2005.
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Fortresses built around S. Texas military bases
Area task force is working quickly to convince government that installations vital
By Brad Olson/Caller-Times
In order to stave off the closure of any of the Coastal Bend's three military installations — Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Naval Air Station Kingsville and Naval Station Ingleside — local officials have organized the South Texas Military Facilities Task Force.
The task force, composed of leaders from area economic development corporations and current and former political officials, has rallied around the bases by protecting airspace from encroachment, enhancing roads and entryways that lead to bases and hiring consultants both locally and in Washington.
Mayor Loyd Neal, the chairman of the task force, said the consultants' primary responsibility is to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
"They are instrumental in preparing the data, the huge amount of community and military data that has to be put into a proper format," he said. "We have a community briefing book and we continually update that information.
"When we visit elected officials, appointed officials and military offices in Washington, that's what we take to them and that's what we talk about, about the strengths of the bases in South Texas."
Keeping them open
But even in lieu of the task force's efforts, protecting area bases during the 2005 closure round may prove difficult.
The Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure commission, or BRAC, plans to shut down about 100 of the nation's military installations, more than all the past four closures combined. The shutdowns have come as an addendum to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's strategic vision for a leaner and meaner American military.
Because communities that house military bases have been weathered by four previous BRAC rounds in less than 20 years, all of them have organized in ways similar to the Coastal Bend and at times raising millions of dollars.
The experience and resources have created an extremely competitive environment pitting community expenditures against one another and making the idea of a local base closure a divisive and contentious issue.
When the Defense Department issued the preliminary criteria by which all national military installations would be judged, U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, said that Coastal Bend bases looked good by those measures.
But all over the country, politicians have made similar comments about bases in the area they represent. All of them say their bases are not in trouble. And all of them say they are doing everything in their power to keep them open.
In past rounds of BRAC closures, NS Ingleside and NAS Kingsville appeared on base closure lists a total of three times. One of those times, according to Dick Messbarger, executive director of the Kingsville Economic Development Corporation, NAS Kingsville was added to the list after an uproar in another community over their base being on the list convinced BRAC officials to target the Kingsville base instead.
According to Vinod Argawal, professor and chair of the Economics Department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., the only way to win in this highly competitive market is to spend money and spend it well.
That is exactly what the task force is doing, Messbarger said.
"What we decided to do was to reorganize the task force a couple years ago, to adopt a budget and to allocate percentages based on county population," he said. "What we've been doing since 1995 is a lot of proactive work in terms of addressing issues at the Naval Air Station."
Short-term devastation
The military's impact on the Coastal Bend's economy is huge. Together, military operations provide for 14 percent of the area's workforce and 21 percent of its salaries and wages, according to a 2001 study financed by the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation.
Losing an installation would have a devastating impact on local economies in the short term, Agarwal said. "It would be a significant loss in your case," he said, "especially in terms of real estate and jobs."
No matter how well a local economy rebounded, he said, the employment void left by a closed military installation would be difficult to fill.
But a closure wouldn't indefinitely cripple the Coastal Bend economy.
Dan Goure, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank, said that communities often fare well several years after a base closes in their vicinity. Often, he said, private industries reap greater utility out of the area the base took up.
Contact Brad Olson at 886-3764 or olsonb@caller.com
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