By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2009
Where once there were trees and fields there stand office buildings adorned with the names of giant military contractors: Northrup Grumman, Sikorsky, Raytheon and more. The road leading to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station has widened from two lanes to six and become lined for miles with shopping centers and big-box stores.
In a county where tobacco once ruled, the defense industry has become king.
As Washington region planners contemplate the effect that the military base realignment and closure (BRAC) process could have on Fort Belvoir and Fort Meade, the transformation and challenges outside the Southern Maryland base in the past decade have helped guide those laying the groundwork for the transfers that will begin in earnest in 2011.
"The biggest thing we've taken from them is to keep being persistent in letting the federal government know of your needs," said Robert C. Leib, the BRAC coordinator for Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold. "You just keep working with them. You keep knocking on the door."
At first glance, the transfer of workers to Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County and Fort Meade in Anne Arundel seems strikingly different from the relocation to the base in rural St. Mary's County that began in the mid-1990s. Belvoir sits in congested Northern Virginia and Meade lies along the busy Baltimore-Washington corridor, while only farmland has competed for space since the facility known as "Pax River" began operation in 1943.
But the demand for more schools and homes, wider roads, improved shopping and better recreational facilities will be no different.
More than 18,000 workers are being transferred to the Belvoir area, and Fairfax has estimated it needs $1.3 billion in road improvements to accommodate the growth. By 2011, Belvoir will be among the biggest military bases in the country and provide more office space than the Pentagon.
Anne Arundel projects 22,000 workers, most of them in related industries, will arrive over the next several years. The state and county have planned an ambitious program of road improvements, office building construction and housing development near Meade. Officials predict construction of more than 15 million square feet of office and retail space, and the price tag for intersection and other road improvements in the area adjacent to the base will exceed $50 million.
In a sour economy, state and local officials worry that infrastructure needs will outstrip the money available to meet them, but they find comfort that the largely civilian workforce coming to Belvoir and Meade tends to be nearly recession proof.
"Things just aren't going to happen overnight," Leib said, "even though everyone's pushing hard as they can."
The best view of the transformation in St. Mary's comes when looking over the shoulder of county Planning Director Jeffrey Jackman as he flips his computer screen between aerial views of 1998 and 2007 along Route 235, which leads to Pax River's gates.
Wooded land on one frame, a shopping center nine years later. A collection for trailer parks, empty fields and roadside shops in 1998 become a huge parking lot and a "super-size Wal-Mart" by last year. A hodgepodge of buildings and open space across from the base's Gate 1 morphs into an office park, home to a half-dozen big defense contractors. Tobacco fields and pastures give way to the cul-de-sacs of suburban-style housing developments.
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.
"At the end of the day," Morgan said, "we could have done a bit better at bringing the farmers and watermen into the conversation.
"And at first, there weren't enough employment opportunities for spouses, so there was too much commuting [for jobs elsewhere]," Morgan said.
Jackman's advice: "Communicate profusely."
"We could have tried to stay a little further ahead of the curve on infrastructure," he said.
Bonnie Bick of the Sierra Club's Maryland chapter said that the planners tackled the sprawl issue but that "the question is, has it been addressed in the long run?"
Jackman said he thinks that has been addressed by new restrictions on development intended to preserve farmland. Where once one dwelling was allowed per acre in rural areas, now seven acres are required to build a new home.
Scarafia said he believes Southern Maryland has "done the best job of any community" with BRAC.
"This was a farming community, so it went through enormous changes," he said. "But the community was able to maintain its character, its philosophy and its way of life."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.