This Joint For Sale

If you had a listed military base in the last round of base closures, one of the ways to protect it was to show it had what the Defense Department called “jointness,” which is a vague way of saying a base had more than one use – a submarine yard might also be home to a Coast Guard unit, for instance. It’s a sensible standard, one that encourages the efficient use of resources, which is why the DoD’s decision to put closed bases up for sale rather than hand them over to the local community as it has done in previous rounds is so disjointedly puzzling.

One a simple level, if those towns don’t get the asset of the closed base, they’ll need more federal assistance from other agencies to recover economically, which you can be sure their congressional delegations will obtain. That’s a roundabout way of helping the communities when what they need is already in their midst but is not coming their way. Where’s the jointness in that?

On its defenselink web site, the DoD extols the possibilities of a community thriving after base closure. One posting says, “While the task of remaking the economic foundation of a community is never easy, a closed base can be a community’s single greatest asset in charting a different future. Experience indicates that communities that lost a base in the 1960s and 1970s have used the facilities to create, on balance, more new jobs than were lost.” Fair to say that happened because local redevelopment authorities had a strong interest in creating jobs so directed development toward them. The military’s interest is different – to get the highest dollar value for the base. When the two conflict, the DoD instruction seems merely to require the department to consider local redevelopment desires. What that means is unclear.

In a recent news story, Defense officials said Brunswick Naval Air Station would be sold at fair market value. Certainly, there are some beneficial aspects to that, including that the DoD gets savings from the base. But where is the assurance to the community? Not that government agencies ever fail to communicate clearly, but it isn’t hard to picture a private buyer completing a deal with the DoD only to find that its first local act is to file a request for a zoning waiver. The base then shifts from the community’s single greatest asset to its single greatest headache.

If the Pentagon is concerned with getting fair market value, it should let local redevelopment authority sell the property, with an appropriate percent of the purchase price remaining in the community. The DoD could have an oversight and auditing role, but would otherwise let locals direct the kind of development they’ll be living with for many years.

That’s jointness, which, as you know, DoD values.