LIMESTONE – The vote to close Loring Air Force Base came in 1991, the same year the flag was lowered for the last time at New Hampshire’s Pease Air Force Base, a victim of the previous round of military base closings.

Now called Pease International Tradeport, the former base boasts 5,500 jobs, five times the number of civilian jobs it had when it was an Air Force base. Loring also has surpassed the number of civilian workers with 1,450 jobs, but it has not been easy.

Unlike Limestone, in Maine’s rural potato country, Pease is on New Hampshire’s Seacoast, 50 miles from Boston, with highways, a deep-water port and plentiful workers.

“When you combine all of those things, Pease was in a perfect location for redevelopment,” said Brian Hamel of Presque Isle, who worked on both redevelopment projects. “It’s the old ‘location, location, location.’ It really worked for them.”

When the Base Realignment and Closure commission begins casting final votes today, supporters of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Brunswick Naval Air Station can take heart in the knowledge that both oceanfront sites are considered desirable for redevelopment.

The shipyard is on a 600-acre island in the Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, N.H., and Kittery. The area’s demographics are essentially the same as those of Pease, which extends from the western end of Portsmouth into Newington, N.H.

The Brunswick Naval Air Station is situated on 3,200 waterfront acres near major highways in Maine’s growing Bath-Brunswick region.

For now, though, base supporters aren’t talking about redevelopment strategies. Their focus is on keeping the bases open.

“At this point I don’t want to discuss any future other than saving the shipyard,” said William McDonough, a retired shipyard commander who has led Save Our Shipyard’s efforts to save the submarine repair yard.

Brunswick and Portsmouth are among more than 600 major bases the closure commission will consider this week.

Also targeted is the Defense Finance and Accounting Service center in Limestone. That was a double-whammy for local officials because the center, which has 323 jobs, was created in 1995 to help offset the economic impact from Loring’s closing.

In Brunswick’s case, the commissioners have three options when they meet Wednesday: closing it, scaling it back or keeping it open.

The panel also will decide this week whether to keep the shipyard and the accounting center open or to shutter them.

Nationwide, the Pentagon says redevelopment efforts at previously closed bases have come close to replacing lost defense industry jobs.

About 115,000 jobs have been created, compared with 130,000 civilian jobs lost, by the 70 redevelopment efforts that release annual reports, according to Glenn Flood, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment.

But those figures don’t tell the entire story.

While the 1,100 civilian jobs lost at Loring have been replaced, Limestone has not come close to replacing the buying power of the 4,000 military personnel who left, said Charles Colgan, an economist at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie Institute.

In northern Maine, the economy imploded when the last Air Force jets departed in 1994. Homes came onto the market with few buyers, and scores of businesses went under. The population spiraled downward for 12 years before hitting bottom last year.

Even the Pease redevelopment wasn’t easy at first. The Pease Development Authority got the land in 1991 during the middle of a regional recession that did not bottom out until two years later, said David Mullen, the authority’s deputy director.

“People need to have patience and recognize that it takes a lot of time to gain traction in redevelopment of any closed defense facility,” Mullen said.

For Brunswick and Portsmouth, the biggest obstacles would be environmental cleanups and the new Pentagon goal of selling property at closed bases to make money for the Treasury, Colgan said. After previous rounds of closings, the Pentagon usually simply turned over base acreage to state and local officials, he said.

Redeveloping the massive Loring complex was still tough.

“Businesses assumed nothing could take root and grow here. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth,” said Carl Flora, who runs the authority from the former base commander’s office.

The Maine Military Authority, one of the biggest outfits at the former base, has 540 workers. Sitel has 250 employees at a call center. A Job Corps center has about 144 faculty and 350 students. And, of course, there’s the accounting center, which has 353 jobs.

In the long run, Colgan sees neighboring communities doing well, even if all the targeted facilities close. But it likely would take years for the communities to regain lost ground.

“It’s not the end of the world by any means,” he said. “Over time, the communities will recover and get back to or exceed the prosperity.”