ft. meade brac

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Originally found at BusinessWeek

The job surge at Fort George G. Meade will turn the sprawling west county Army installation into one of the largest workplaces in the nation, making it well more than double the size of the Pentagon.

By 2015, an estimated 52,225 people — more people than live in the world’s eight smallest countries and well more than the 36,408 who live in Annapolis — are expected to report to work at the post every day.

But that’s just the beginning.

The Pentagon, one of the world’s largest office buildings, is diminutive in comparison to the office space being built near the installation. In fact, it would fit inside the new facilities four times over.

It will take miles of new roads, a small fleet of buses and more desks and teachers at schools to maintain the quality of life that county residents enjoy today — all paid for with money that isn’t here yet.

There will be growing pains. It will be a period where the number of people working in the county will outstrip what the infrastructure — particularly the roads — can handle.

But there is a safety net. The bulk of the new jobs will be held by people with hefty salaries — paychecks that will bolster state and county governments’ coffers and the economy in general.

Most of the jobs coming to Fort Meade and surrounding offices will be held by civilians, many with advanced degrees and with paychecks pushing six figures. The much-discussed and analyzed Base Realignment and Closure process, or BRAC, is only about a quarter of the new jobs headed for Fort Meade, but the actual job boom area officials are expecting is much larger.

For planning purposes, officials talk about “growth at Fort Meade” to reflect the much larger, more complex workforce expansion at the post, but BRAC is the prevailing jargon for any and all of the new jobs.

From when the first trickle of jobs start to arrive in 2010 to a big rush later in the year, and back down to a slow trickle by 2015, an estimated 22,000 new jobs will have either been created or moved to Fort Meade, making it the state’s largest employer by tens of thousands of people.

Preparing for their arrival is a problem of numbers. The people entrusted with making the job growth as painless as possible are planning where these employees will live, where their children will go to school and how they will get to work.

But they are working against a bottleneck caused by red tape and tight budgets at a time when national and local governments are strapped for cash.

The projected growth in west county predates BRAC, which was announced in May 2005. By that time, county officials had long targeted western Anne Arundel as an area for new homes, businesses, schools and roads.

As early as December 2001, then-County Executive Janet S. Owens referred to the area around Fort Meade as the “gold coast” for its ability to charge and expand the county’s economy.

If her assessment and the predictions of other officials are correct, it’s a wave of money that will grow in size for at least a decade before it begins to plateau.

“It means positive economic growth in a time of economic challenge,” said Bob Leib, special assistant to the county executive for BRAC. “It means families supporting high-quality jobs for our citizens in the near, immediate and far future. It means Anne Arundel County continues to be a location where technology-oriented, knowledge-based jobs are growing and can be the backbone of our economy.”

While it’s one of the most significant events in the history of the county’s and state’s economy, it’s not going to be a blink-your-eyes-and-it’s-done-with affair. It will take years, billions of dollars, millions of square feet of office space, thousands of homes and thousands of tons of steel and concrete.

“People think it’s just going to happen like this, but it’s not,” said Bert Rice, the BRAC and Enhanced Use Lease project officer at Fort Meade. “It will be over a period of five to 10 years.

And it won’t just be construction that lasts for a decade, it will be a flow of jobs and new neighbors, he said.

BRAC is not just something at Fort Meade. And for some places, it’s not a boon, but a bane. It’s a nationwide reshuffling of military assets. Some military installations will downsize and others will close entirely as their workers are transferred to other installations, possibly forcing some people to move away from their homes to keep their jobs.

For some cities, it’s the equivalent of a major employer vaporizing, like General Motors slashing jobs in Michigan. But Maryland is one of the biggest BRAC beneficiaries in the country. Besides jobs coming to Fort Meade, Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County is anticipating about 8,200 jobs.

And when all is said and done, there still will be room on Fort Meade’s 5,000 acres for even more military jobs.

“We still have room to build,” said Ted Hartman, formerly the installation’s chief BRAC coordinator.

According to the Regional Economic Studies Institute at Towson University, these new jobs will increase revenue into the county’s and state’s treasuries.

By 2015, every year Anne Arundel will receive about $18.5 million in property taxes and $11.6 million in income taxes, nearly enough to build a new, large elementary school. The state tax figures, which account for job increases at other military installations as well, predict about $2.6 million in property taxes and $20.5 million in income taxes. In total there will be nearly $60 million more in local government coffers every year.

The jobs

BRAC brings other jobs along with it. For example, as a new communication organization moves onto Fort Meade, it will contract with private-sector information-technology companies, luring more jobs outside of the post. And all these people, both military employees and private sectors alike, will need construction workers to build their new offices on the post, people to sell them insurance, fix their cars, teach their kids, clean their teeth, deliver their mail and countless other spin-off jobs.

While the total number of BRAC jobs coming to Maryland can be quantified, these tertiary jobs — as the spin-offs are called — are harder to count. But there are a few varying estimates.

In all, the State Department of Planning is anticipating about 42,364 new jobs in Maryland. The county predicts about 22,000 new jobs at Fort Meade alone, but its planners look at different factors when making the calculation.

While it only accounts for about a quarter of the new workers at the fort, BRAC is the most discussed and planned part of the job surge. When all is said and done, about 5,400 jobs from three different military organizations will move to the post from locations around the country.

By federal law, this process must be complete by Sept. 15, 2011.

Today, construction is nearly complete on the massive DISA building. Work continues on other buildings on the post, but when it is done, this will be the home of three new office complexes that will host all of the BRAC jobs.

The Defense Information Systems Agency accounts for the largest share of the BRAC jobs with more than 4,200 jobs now in Northern Virginia bound for Fort Meade. Most of them are information technology and communications specialists.