Planners Look to Pax River as Guide Ahead of Military Base Expansions

All the trappings of suburban Washington have migrated 64 highway miles southeast to Lexington Park, including traffic.

"Take a look at 235," Jackman said as he pointed to a two-lane highway in a 1998 overview. "That's six lanes out there today!"

The transformation has also changed Pax River from simply an employer that co-existed with the county to one that dominates it economically. The changes began with a series of BRAC decisions in 1991, 1993 and 1995 that transferred Navy operations there from Arlington, Warminster, Pa., and Trenton, N.J.

Since then, the county population has grown by a third, topping 100,000 for the first time last year. The state and local governments have spent an estimated $350 million on infrastructure to support that in the past decade.

More than one in four county residents work for the Navy or defense contractors connected to the high-tech testing and development missions on the 6,400-acre base. The base employees 22,000 military and civilian workers, and 14 defense contractors account for an additional 6,500.

"It's been a real eye-opener for little old St. Mary's County," said William Scarafia, president of the Chamber of Commerce. "It's still little old St. Mary's County in the quality of life and the attitude of the people, but now we do it in the 21st century."

The tobacco crop that ruled 8,300 acres of county farmland in 1982 had dwindled to 600 acres of production by 2004. At the middle of last century, the county had 1,380 farms, and 65 percent of the county was farmland. By 2002, there were 577 farms claiming less than half as much countryside.

Looking back on a decade of growth and change, there is agreement among those who orchestrated and guided the transformation that the key to success was planning that transcended county boundaries, the natural division between civilian and military leadership, and the diverse interests of the farming, military and environmental communities.

"If we got parochial and said, 'It's all about my county,' we were going to lose that battle," said Todd Morgan, a defense contractor who headed the Southern Maryland Navy Alliance, a private, nonprofit organization that supports the base and participated in the planning. "We tried to keep the politicians out of it because it would become too parochial."

Morgan was among a group of business leaders from the three Southern Maryland counties who developed strategies that were presented to state and local officials. Their biggest challenge was to build or improve infrastructure -- roads, schools and similar amenities -- fast enough to meet demand.

In addition to massive new roadways near the base, the county built its first new school since 1980 and has put millions of dollars into improving schools. From 2000 to 2007, more than 6,000 new housing units -- single-family homes, townhouses and apartments -- were built.

More than a dozen years into the expansion, there is general satisfaction with the outcome and a willingness to critique the effort for the benefit of those at other bases now facing an influx of BRAC transfers.