Galena BRAC meeting in Washington DC
11-29-06
Tim Bodony (KIYU)

Audio version of story: 120106_YoderInDC.mp3 (as heard on the 11/29/06 version of KIYU's Interior Voices)

City of Galena officials traveled to Washington DC this week, in an attempt to firm up a deal with the Air Force that would extend financial help to Galena past a 2008 deadline.  But the meeting did not yield any major new developments.  

The Galena Economic Development Committee has appealed to top Air Force officials for more lenience, asserting that a September 30, 2008 closure date puts an insurmountable hardship on the community, and threatens the collapse of the local economy.   

Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary Fred Kuhn, one of the top Air Force officials overseeing the BRAC process at the national level, responded favorably to that argument, and in a letter dated November 13, stated that the Air Force is willing to maintain certain buildings in Galena beyond the 2008 closure deadline.    

Speaking after a meeting on Monday with Air Force officials and staff from Senator Lisa Murkowski’s office, Galena Special Assistant to the Mayor Marvin Yoder reported to APRN’s Joel Southern that the meeting was not the step-forward he had hoped for.  

Instead, the effort to plan for life after the Air Force in Galena now finds itself in a chicken-versus-egg situation: the reuse plan needs to know if the Air Force will commit money past the 2008 deadline, and the Air Force won’t commit that money until it sees the reuse plan.  

"The big issue," Yoder said, "is we are working on a reuse plan. They [the Air Force] would like to see the reuse plan carried a little bit farther until they make any commitments.  We did talk about the fact that its real difficult for a small community like Galena to actually put together this plan without some type of help - moving from an operation that is now on an Air Force that is already heated, to something where we have to pay for everything ourselves, is going to be a difficult transition." 

The Galena City School District has a plan to almost triple the size of the boarding school to serve more than 300 students, and the expansion of the school will most likely be the foundation of Galena’s reuse plan.   

The school is at maximum capacity of its current buildings, and would require more space, as soon as next year, in order to expand.   

But Yoder says that taking control of more buildings – without the possibility of cost sharing with the Air Force – is not something that the City of Galena can afford over the next few years, without outside assistance. 

"The biggest gap I think we have is transition as we try to go from a half million dollar operation a year, where the school is spending that much on utilities and maintenance, to where they are going to be spending 2 or 3 million dollars for utilities and maintenance. Transitioning to a full, sustainable operation out there is the big issue," according to Yoder.

A team of consultants, led by engineering firm USKH, has begun work on a comprehensive reuse plan for the Galena Air Force Base.  A draft is due on March 1^st. 

Monday’s meeting in DC gave Yoder a clearer sense of the role that the Air Force Real Property Agency will play in the months and years ahead.  The Real Property Agency is charged with acquiring or divesting land holdings for the Air Force, and its Director, Katie Halverson, was a part of the meeting this week.  

“We hope that at some point in time some of the Air Force personnel from real estate [Real Property Agency] can sit down with the consultants," says Yoder, "and we can find out what criteria they are looking for, what is going to be critical in this reuse plan that will help them make their decision on how much they can help us.” 

According to Deputy Assistant Secretary Kuhn’s November 13th letter, the Air Force wants a state-approved version of the reuse plan by April 1, before it makes a final commitment to pay for the upkeep of certain buildings in Galena, beyond the 2008 closure deadline.