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Closures mean retiree upheaval


South Mississippi
Saturday, May 7, 2005

Sometime between now and May 16, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will release a list of military bases the department wants closed, calling it unneeded infrastructure that wastes billions of dollars annually. Community leaders in affected areas will express shock and anger. Lobbyists will begin pumping out reasons why a new nine-member Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission should spare particular bases from the final list to be sent the White House by Sept. 8.

And tens of thousands of military retirees relying on these bases for medical care, free drugs, discount shopping and more will wonder whether to pull up roots and move near a base not on the BRAC list. The size of retiree migrations from past BRAC rounds is a mystery. But there's general agreement among BRAC experts that this round of closings should trigger smaller retiree migrations than past rounds.

They point to two healthcare options enacted since BRAC 1995 that should ease the expense for retirees of living without a base. They are TRICARE for Life, the robust insurance supplement to Medicare for service elderly, and the increasingly popular TRICARE mail-order pharmacy plan. They also cite a boom in commercial discount stores, such as Wal-Mart and Price Club, which now compete with military base stores for customers. Several Arizona cities commissioned a study in 2002 to measure the effect of nearby bases on their economies.

The study contractor, Maguire Company of Phoenix, found it reasonable in conducting its analysis to assume that 25 percent of military retirees living within 50 miles of a base were so "linked" to its amenities that they would leave the area if the base closed.

The 25 percent was no more than a guess, the study suggested. Yet a professor at Rutgers University, Michael J. Lahr, used the figure last year in a study for the governor of New Jersey to estimate the impact of base closures in that state. Lahr conceded in his report he was unable to find any information on the probable proportion of military retirees "who would relocate if all military bases in New Jersey were shuttered."

Lahr wrote that he was using the Arizona study's 25 percent estimate in his own economic models because there is no reason to believe New Jersey-base military retirees would behave any differently. Sociology professor Mark Fagan at Jackson (Ala.) State University actually surveyed retirees living in Calhoun County, home of Fort McClellan, in 1995 after the Pentagon released its last BRAC list. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they would leave the county if McClellan closed.

But when the base finally did, in 1999, there was no follow-up census to learn how many of the surveyed retirees actually did move. Whatever the percentage was, Fagan suggested in a recent phone interview, fewer retirees likely would migrate today from a new BRAC area. Fagan said he recently proposed to local community leaders that they encourage developers to turn portions of McClellan, including base housing, the golf course, ponds and walking trails, into a retirement community.

The lack of hard facts about retiree migration from BRAC rounds shouldn't obscure some harsh realities. One reason retirees might not flee is housing prices often plummet in the months following release of a BRAC list. Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), perhaps the toughest critic of BRAC 2005 in Congress, calls it "incredibly wasteful" and illogical, given that the nation is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the Pentagon has a re-basing plan set that will relocate to stateside bases more than 70,000 service members and 100,000 dependents and defense civilians now assigned overseas.

Taylor charges Rumsfeld and staff with "pulling out of thin air" their early estimate for this BRAC round that the military is burdened with 24 percent excess base capacity. Of particular concern to Taylor and his constituents is the likelihood that the Pascagoula Naval Station, home to 2,500 sailors and 5,000 family members, will be on the closure list.

"There's a lot of handwriting on the wall," Taylor said, including a decline in recent years in the number of ships home ported there. Once a base is on the list, Taylor said, "it's almost impossible to turn it around." If a base is to close, Taylor said, a retiree migration begins." About half of all our nation's (two million) military retirees chose to retire near a base so they could use the hospital, the commissary, and the golf course and recreational opportunities that are there.

When the base closes, everything closes....and you have really devastated their lives," Taylor said TRICARE for Life will cushion the blow for older retirees, he conceded. But most retirees and many others living in BRAC areas still will lose a lot. New BRAC Commission Chairman Anthony Principi didn't shy away from such perceptions at a May 3 inaugural hearing on Capitol Hill. "The ripples of the proposals" to be announced this month, Principi said, "will be tsunamis in the communities they hit.

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