Published: San Antonio Express News

Date: April 14, 2008

Reported by: Sig Christenson, Express News Military Writer


San Antonio will lose its second military installation in a decade when the Air Force leaves Brooks City-Base in three years, but things could be worse.


The city will gain up to 12,100 jobs at Fort Sam Houston as part of the 2005 Defense Base Realignment and Closure (commonly known as BRAC) round. It also will see a makeover of Brooks that wouldn't have come without the threat of another BRAC.


"You go on a vacation to Las Vegas and you end up coming away a big winner, and the only thing you want to concentrate on were the three bad hands that you had there," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. John G. Jernigan, who once commanded Brooks and led an effort to save it. "So I think that we in San Antonio should be happy with how things have come out."


A recent ceremony in fabled Hangar 9 marked the beginning of the end for Brooks by shuffling people, positions and organizations in anticipation of their transfer to a rival base near Dayton, Ohio. A Brooks brain drain will follow — though how bad it will be isn't clear. An unusual arrangement in which the Air Force leases space from a quasi-city agency that runs Brooks will end, and a fat federal check along with it.


The base will bid farewell to 2,297 military and civilian workers with salaries averaging $63,986 a year. The figure does not include hundreds of workers under contract to the Air Force.


The Brooks Development Authority, which owns and operates the 1,246-acre property, will lose $13.3 million a year in Air Force lease payments. The Air Force will vacate 1.7 million square feet of office space.


The orderly transition of Air Force assets from Brooks to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio began March 28 with Col. Charles Fisher Jr. taking command of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine.


The Air Force Institute for Operational Health was mothballed in the same ceremony, although its work goes on under another command. The School of Aerospace Medicine and a directorate of the 311th Human Systems Wing were put under the command of a new organization at Wright-Patterson.


With those changes made, the Air Force is poised to begin moving the first of 852 military and civilian jobs from Brooks to Ohio. That won't happen until June 2010, Air Force spokesman Ed Shannon said, but when it does, other missions will leave Brooks, too. One big move will be 857 high-tech jobs jumping to Fort Sam and the two other Air Force bases here, Lackland and Randolph.


Those close to the closure process say civilian workers at Brooks were asked in 2005 if they would move to Ohio. One expert familiar with the issue, asking not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said "a number" of highly educated Brooks workers have said they would move. Brooks could not find the survey, but the expert said fewer than one in three workers usually relocates as a base closes.


Still, everyone interviewed for this report was optimistic about Brooks' future despite BRAC, largely because of long-running redevelopment efforts there. The loss of Kelly AFB, which shuttered in 2001, spurred the city to cut a deal with the Air Force. Brooks would become a one-of-a-kind installation — a municipally owned property that leased space to the military.


One idea behind Brooks City-Base was to persuade the Air Force to keep its missions at Brooks by saving the service money. The other was to redevelop the base well before it might be closed.


Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, then-Mayor Ed Garza and Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles, among others, signed a certificate officially creating Brooks City-Base on July 22, 2002. Some dared to dream that it would transform the way the Air Force did business and perhaps even spark a South Side renaissance.


"What we're doing today is staggering in a sense," Brig. Gen. Lloyd E. Dodd Jr., commander of Brooks' 311th Human Systems Wing, said at a ceremony at the time. "What we are doing is creating something entirely new. We are giving birth to a unique entity, something that has the powerful potential to benefit not just the community, not just the Air Force, Department of Defense, but all of America."


He had it partly right. The Air Force put Brooks on the 2005 closure list and hasn't repeated the City-Base experiment. But if Washington didn't buy into the concept, some businesses did.


Dozens of retail shops on one corner of Brooks, the 62-acre City-Base Landing, thrive, with parking lots full of cars. A Subway was busy at noon on a recent Friday, drawing six airmen in camouflage fatigues. South New Braunfels Avenue is being extended. Brooks City-Base is home to a $24.5 million Emergency Operations Center.


"City-Base is much farther along than any other BRAC base in the country because the property was transferred in 2002," said Mark Frye, a local consultant with long experience in base closure issues.


Woolf said, "One of the shining parts is they sold off that corner and it's a really, really nice retail center, which is something I never thought I'd see on the South Side of San Antonio."


The development authority sold the parcel that became City-Base Landing to a developer in 2004 and reinvested the money into new infrastructure that will permit growth on the old base.


That sale is part of a model for how the authority funds redevelopment on Brooks. The authority's main focus is to build or renovate buildings for specific businesses and rent the space.


It did just that with DPT Laboratories, building 250,000 square feet of warehouse, research and office space. The entire facility, which cost about $28 million, will be paid for in 22 years — the same period DPT has leased it, said the authority's chief executive officer, Donald Jakeway.


Things have gone so well — so far — that the city's annual operations and maintenance subsidy, now set at $400,000, will end this fall. After that, he said, the authority will be on its own.


But Jakeway said the authority ought to be able to weather the first few years after the Air Force is gone without being subsidized by the city again. And he actually wants the service to leave and hand over its building space, which accounts for most of the 2 million square feet on Brooks — though not before the BRAC law's scheduled closure date of Sept. 15, 2011.


The reason: simple math.


Jakeway said the Air Force pays about $7.50 per square foot. Renovated space on City-Base likely will range from $12 to $16 per square foot, he added, while new buildings will fetch anywhere from $16 to $21.


"I don't want them to go before they're supposed to go because I need the money," Jakeway laughed.


Roadwork now under way, in the meantime, promises better access. The Texas Department of Transportation will revamp the exits off Interstate 37 and onto Southeast Military Drive, smoothing westbound traffic to Goliad Road and making it safer.


The $48 million, four-mile extension of South New Braunfels from Military Drive south to Loop 410 began in September. The project will be done in four phases, with the first two parts completed by 2010. The remaining two phases will be done later, when the authority has the funds for them.


If all goes well, the direct access to City-Base provided by the expansion will increase the value of nearby land owned by the authority.


Motorists will see walkways with decorative lighting along the four-lane road.


"My favorite line in talking about this is we've experienced three BRACs — Kelly, Brooks and the Alamo," said former Mayor Howard Peak, who headed the Brooks Development Authority board until last year. "Each of them has worked out very well for San Antonio."