Stung once, Limestone waits Employees, residents ‘optimistic’ as DFAS hangs in balance

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LIMESTONE – Last month it was a numbers game. This month, a waiting game.

“I try not to think about it,” said Bryan Thompson, a staff accountant at Limestone’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which is targeted for closure as part of the ongoing Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, process.

Those trying to spare the center’s 350 employees already have had their day in court, so to speak, countering Pentagon calculations that put the Limestone facility – as well as 22 others – on the closure list.

Now the fate of the Limestone center – and, in some ways, of the town – rests with the independent nine-member commission reviewing the Defense Department plan. The commission is expected to release its findings on Aug. 23, more than two weeks before the Sept. 8 deadline to submit its recommendation to President Bush.

Despite his efforts to be patient during that period, Thompson, 24, has thought long and hard about the prospect of the center’s closure.

So has his wife, Melissa. The couple, while “cautiously optimistic” – a common phrase in town nowadays – already have explored moving to greener economic pastures should the center close.

“But we’re optimistic,” Thompson repeated, prompting a quick, “That’s right,” from Melissa, who, like her high school sweetheart husband, was born in nearby Caribou.

“Well, we try to be,” she added after a pause and a glance up at Bryan as the couple’s toddler son, Landon, busied himself exploring a local coffee shop.

The wait-and-see attitude is shared by many in Limestone, a small agrarian town in northern Aroostook County still stinging from the 1994 closure of Loring Air Force Base, the loss of which drained about 10,000 people from the area and crippled the local economy.

“This would be twice,” Pauline Gaskins, 61, said over lunch at Kelley’s Restaurant, one of Limestone’s few remaining Main Street storefronts. “It’s just too much.”

Like Gaskins, who worked at the base dining hall before it closed, many townspeople take particular exception to the Limestone center’s listing, part of the Pentagon’s effort to reduce the number of DFAS sites from 26 to three and reduce the work force from 14,400 to 11,000 by 2011.

Once described as the “crown jewel” of the base’s redevelopment, DFAS was placed there, in part, to lessen the economic blow from Loring’s loss.

Loring’s closure, despite similarly concerted efforts to keep it open, still weighs on the minds of people like Paul Haines, 71, a lifelong resident of the area.

“The [Defense Department] did it before. Why wouldn’t they do it again?” Haines, a retired insurance company executive, said while finishing his lunch at a nearby table at Kelley’s. “We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Second chance

While Haines remains doubtful that the Limestone center will be spared, others in town have been encouraged by recent actions of the base closure commission.

Its unanimous vote last month to add DFAS megacenters in Denver, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, to the closure list marked an early victory for those trying to save Limestone.

The Pentagon had planned to consolidate its accounting operations at those three centers. Placing them on the list alongside the others levels the playing field when it comes to deciding which DFAS sites will remain open, said Walt Elish, director of the Aroostook Partnership for Progress.

“That will open up everything,” said Elish, who after the listing of the three Midwest centers put the chances of Limestone’s survival at 50 percent – much better than the 10 percent odds he predicted before their inclusion.

But most agree mere survival will not be enough for Limestone, which commissioners have suggested will have to grow in order to have a place in the consolidated DFAS system.

During the regional base closure hearings in Boston, commission member Gen. Lloyd W. “Fig” Newton, who visited Limestone in June, asked the Maine delegation to provide detailed cost estimates of expanding the facility to 1,000 workers.

The significance, if any, of such requests – or even passing mentions of the “low-cost” Limestone facility at subsequent hearings in Washington, D.C. – have not been lost on the DFAS workers, many of whom are following the BRAC process closely.

“When we hear the name Limestone, we know it’s on their minds and they’re thinking about it,” said Bryan Thompson, who started at the center as an intern about three years ago.

Thompson, who now lives in Stockholm, was just a kid when Loring closed, and Haines, who worked on the failed 1991 effort to save the base, doesn’t put much stock in the BRAC commission’s praise for the DFAS facility, one of the newest in the system.

“I think we’re getting a lot of lip service, but that’s all it is, lip service,” Haines said.

The current DFAS system – a small operation by Pentagon standards – was created when the Defense Department consolidated about 300 accounting operations into the 26 sites.

DFAS has received relatively little attention thus far in the BRAC process, which also calls for the closure of 33 major military bases, including Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, where more than 4,000 people work.

While some state delegations have made cases to retain their DFAS operations, others, where perhaps economic opportunity is greater, have been more accepting of the loss.

For instance, in Texas, which stands to gain more than 6,000 net jobs under BRAC, there has been relatively little public outcry about saving the 303 civilian jobs at the DFAS center in San Antonio, a city that stands to gain 3,500 jobs under the Pentagon’s plan.

In Denver, where the DFAS center employs 1,250 people, some officials even have suggested the land would be worth more if it – like much of the remaining former Lowry Air Force Base – were allowed to be developed privately.

BRAC countdown

The story is much different three hours north of Bangor in Limestone, where the economic impact of DFAS closing is higher than anywhere in the nation.

Defense Department estimates say the lost jobs make up 1 percent of the area’s total work force. Maine officials, using a smaller geographic area to measure the impact, put the number at 2 percent.

“The plan will result in a federally induced major economic recession,” Gov. John Baldacci warned the commission at the Boston hearings in July.

Today at the sprawling Loring base there’s a trickle of traffic on the maze of once busy four-lane roads.

There are a few Humvees from the nearby Maine Military Authority maintenance facility and some civilian traffic to and from the Sitel Corp., a call center, and from Job Corps, the other federal anchor at the former base.

Ironically, its supporters say, the Limestone DFAS facility – ranked 17th by the Pentagon out of the 26 sites – lost points in the Defense Department analysis for not being on an active military base.

Its backers, which include the entire Maine congressional delegation and Gov. Baldacci, have argued that the standard should not apply to the Limestone facility, which nevertheless sits behind a guarded and locked security gate constantly monitored by surveillance cameras.

Beyond the gate and inside the DFAS center, it appeared to be business as usual during a recent visit. Workers sat in their cubicles and punched away at their keyboards, balancing the books for 38 active-duty Air Force bases and 34 Air National Guard bases.

Sept. 30 marks the end of the fiscal year, and work has taken precedence over worries about a pending closure.

“It keeps your mind off it,” said Gail McPherson, who during her eight-year tenure became the first worker there to win the national DFAS Great Performer Award for outstanding customer service.

Like 85 percent of the center’s work force, McPherson, 50, is from the area and, like 85 percent of her co-workers, she has a college degree – percentages far higher than at most DFAS facilities, Elish said. Living with her husband on a potato farm about an hour away in Blaine, McPherson has deep roots here.

And no plans to leave.

Despite being “from away,” neither does the center’s director, Larry Conrad, better known as “Mr. C” by his employees, all of whom he knows by name and who smile and say hello as he gives visitors a tour through the building.

“I was the first one in here when we opened,” Conrad, 61, later said from his spacious second-floor office, “and I told the employees I will be the last one out if it closes.”