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Recovery takes time--five to 10 years in most cases--and there are hurdles and frustrations along the way. "But there is life after a base closure," says Tim Ford, executive director of the Association of Defense Communities, a nonprofit organization that has been advising cities and towns facing closings over the past 30 years. Here is how four communities have coped...
Austin, Texas, was at first staggered when the news arrived in spring 1991 that nearby Bergstrom Air Force Base was on the base-closings list. The 12th Air Force headquarters and two air wings at the 52-year-old facility would take almost 5,000 military and civilian jobs with them once they moved out, and that was projected to drain $339 million annually from the local economy...
...outgrown. Bergstrom, with its 12,250-ft. runway, on which giant B-52 bombers could land, was ideal for the jumbo jets that carry the international air-cargo traffic Austin wanted to attract. So the city seized the opportunity, wading through mounds of federal red tape to have the base transferred to it and persuading reluctant airlines to relocate to a facility that would need extensive renovation for commercial traffic. A $400 million local bond referendum was passed to convert the base into a commercial airport, and federal and state money came in to build highways feeding into the facility...
...Salt Lick Barbecue Restaurant serve local delicacies, and a stage in the concourse offers live music. The airport brings in $1.8 billion annually and has created 35,700 new jobs. Bruce Todd, who was mayor in 1991, regrets the time the city initially wasted trying to fight the base closing. His advice to mayors facing what he did: "Leave the past behind" and "visualize the future...
...picture in Denver and its eastern suburb of Aurora on Sept. 30, 1994, the day the flag was lowered for the last time at Lowry Air Force Base, was typical of what many communities see when their military facilities close. "We had a thousand empty buildings," recalls Tom Markham, executive director of the Lowry Redevelopment Authority. "We had abandoned runways. We had utilities that were old and in the wrong place." The pain of losing 7,500 civilian jobs at Lowry, where the Air Force had a technical training center, was compounded five years later by the closing of nearby...