BRAC Commission Early Bird August 28, 2005 Page: 3 of 28
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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.
Eight years later, city officials proudly stood on
the tarmac of the new Austin-Bergstrom
International Airport as Air Force One taxied up
with Bill Clinton inside as one of the first
arrivals. The terminal has special touches:
Amy's Ice Cream and the 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."
THE LOWRY SHOWCASE
The 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 Fitzsimmons
Army Medical Center, which had 12,000
employees. Those two shutdowns, combined
with the closing of the city-owned Stapleton
Airport, left heavily urban northeastern Denver
and suburban Aurora with 11 sq. mi. of land in
desperate need of recycling.
Rebuilding was not easy. The Air Force was
slow to turn over its property, and the
environmental cleanup proved time consuming.
But today Denver and Aurora proudly call that
land Redevelopment Triangle. The two cities are
80% of the way toward their goal of creating
10,000 jobs there and filling the area with 4,500
homes and apartments, plus 2 million square feetof offices, retail stores and restaurants worth $
1.3 billion.
The community, like others, "fought very hard
to keep the base open," says Aurora Mayor Ed
Tauer. "But once it became clear that the base
would close, very quickly we shifted from
mourning the loss to looking at the opportunity."
In short order, local leaders organized a
development group and agreed on a refurbishing
plan, helped along by $ 12 million in local, state
and federal grants. "I don't think there's any
doubt that the community is better off [than
when the base was there]," says Markham. The
Air Force, for example, paid no property taxes,
which are currently collected on the new homes
and businesses, and the military jobs that left
paid less than the ones that took their place. The
Association of Defense Communities sponsored
a conference in Denver in June for
representatives from more than 200 communities
whose bases have closed or are about to close,
using the Lowry redevelopment as a showcase
for prospering after the military decamps.
ELVIS WAS HERE
Recovery can be easier for big cities like Denver
and Austin, where millions of dollars can be
generated locally to rebuild. About all Fort
Smith, Ark., had in abundance was patriotic
pride when the Pentagon announced 14 years
ago that its Fort Chaffee Army post would be
closed. Homes in the small city of about 85,000
at the Oklahoma border fly the American flag
year round, and folks always welcomed the
hundreds of thousands of young G.I.s who had
trained at the post since the 1940s. (Elvis Presley
got his first Army haircut there after being
inducted in 1958.) Arkansas National Guard and
other military reserve units still use about 66,000
acres of largely vacant land from the post for
exercises. The remaining 6,000 acres, which
contained much of the installation's main
facilities, were turned over to a municipal
development authority to convert to a residential
and business community.
But what the city got was a collection of
eyesores: about a hundred World War II--
vintage barracks and buildings with asbestos inBRAC Commission Early Bird
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United States. Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. BRAC Commission Early Bird August 28, 2005, text, August 28, 2005; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc23305/m1/3/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.