Local officials: BRAC hearing worth the trip

Advocates agree adding fort to megabase a good compromise

BY SUE M. MORGAN Staff Writer

BY SUE M. MORGAN
Staff Writer

Waking up at 4 a.m. to catch a chartered bus to Baltimore outside Eatontown’s Monmouth Mall in heavy rains on July 8 was worth losing a few Z’s, according to Oceanport Mayor Maria Gatta.

Considering what the armed forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan go through each day, arising before dawn and going out in the remnants of tropical storm Cindy was a minor inconvenience, said Gatta, whose community hosts about 500 of the 1,100 acres that make up Fort Monmouth, which the Pentagon has targeted for closure.

Though the shutdown, under the U.S. Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) plan, would wreak havoc on the economy and culture of Oceanport and four other communities that host or neighbor the U.S. Army installation, Gatta stressed that those soldiers and base employees are just too important to the nation’s well-being as a whole.

That is why Gatta — and about 40 other Fort Monmouth advocates — took the bus to Goucher College in Towson, Md., to show the federal BRAC commission, the nine-member independent panel now weighing the base’s fate, how much local support exists for the fort.

Protecting the soldier in battle with the lifesaving technologies developed at Fort Monmouth by highly skilled civilian engineers and scientists should be the most paramount concern of the Defense Department, Gatta said.

Shortly after the Pentagon’s May 13 announcement that Fort Monmouth was targeted in the BRAC round with most of its technical missions transferred to the Aberdeen (Md.) Proving Ground, Gatta spoke to an Oceanport man whose son was home on leave from serving with the Army in Iraq.

Both father and son were worried about the possible fort closure, Gatta recalled.

“His son had asked, ‘What is going to happen to us, the soldiers,?’ ” Gatta said. “They need to have a sense of security. They need to feel that they are safe.”

Even if the Patriots Alliance, a local group of Fort Monmouth defense contractors, had not chartered the bus, Tinton Falls Councilman Brendan Tobin said he would have driven more than two hours to Maryland anyway.

The bus just made it a little easier to get to the regional hearing on the proposed closure, said Tobin, whose community hosts about 200 acres of the more than 80-year-old base.

Fort Monmouth’s communications and electronics missions (CECOM) produce “jammers,” an advanced technology that thwarts the signals sent by enemy forces to set off improvised explosive devices (IED), or roadside bombs.

Local production of such lifesaving inventions must continue, Tobin pointed out.

“A big piece of what comes out of Fort Monmouth is the jammers for the IEDs,” he said.

The Pentagon’s proposal, which fort advocates claim could slow down the flow of technology to the battlefields, does not consider the plight of the soldiers, he noted.

“You never turn your back on [the soldiers],” Tobin said.

Eatontown Mayor Gerald J. Tarantolo, who testified on behalf of the five host communities before the BRAC commission, traveled the Amtrak to Baltimore.

Tarantolo recalled that as he sat at a table onstage inside Goucher’s auditorium and looked across at the four BRAC commissioners, they appeared to be captivated by the statistics and figures he read from a community-impact study describing the potential economic effects of a fort on the host towns.

“They were looking on with interest,” said Tarantolo, whose municipality holds about another 500 acres of the fort. “Hopefully, we penetrated their minds and they got the thrust of what we were trying to present.”

Reading from the study produced by Jeffrey Donohue, a New Hampshire-based real estate consultant, Tarantolo told the BRAC commissioners that closing Fort Monmouth would have a “devastating impact” on the economies of Eatontown, Oceanport, Tinton Falls, the neighboring towns of Shrewsbury and Little Silver, and upon Monmouth County and New Jersey as a whole.

Citing statistics gathered by Donohue in the state Department of Community Affairs-funded study, Tarantolo testified that a collective 1,325 of Fort Monmouth’s more than 5,000 civilian employees live in one of the five local municipalities, while almost another 800 residents of those towns work for private-sector defense contractors on post.

“Fort Monmouth plays a historical, cultural and economic role in our communities,” Tarantolo stressed during the hearing, which was broadcast live in its entirety on C-SPAN-2.

All three officials praised New Jersey contingent’s of lawmakers and military experts for recommending that Fort Monmouth’s commands be merged into the joint military installation the Pentagon has planned for the Army’s Fort Dix, McGuire Air Force Base and Lakehurst Naval Air Station under the

BRAC process.

Blending Fort Monmouth’s operations in with what the Pentagon is calling a megabase could be feasible because the three other bases, located contiguous to each other in Burlington and Ocean counties, are less than 25 miles from the Monmouth County base, the three officials concurred.

The merger of the four bases was put forth as an alternative to the Aberdeen Proving Ground transfer largely by retired Vice Admiral Paul G. Gaffney II, president of Monmouth University, West Long Branch.

“It’s a very smart strategy to pursue,” said Tarantolo, a U.S. Air Force veteran. “You can’t just say, ‘Take me off the [BRAC] list.’ You have to offer something in its place.”

At more than 7,000 acres, the Aberdeen base might have more land, but part of it is across the Chesapeake Bay from where its offices and buildings are situated, according to Tobin.

“It takes longer to drive from one end of Aberdeen to the other than it does to drive from Fort Monmouth to Fort Dix,” he said.

Most of what Fort Monmouth builds is software-related, rather than actual weapons, Tobin noted.

“I don’t know if [the BRAC commission] is going to change things,” Tobin said. “But our guys presented an excellent, cohesive package of facts.”

Meanwhile, Gatta hopes that the BRAC recognizes Fort Monmouth’s willingness to work cohesively with the other three bases.

“That point was well-made that Fort Monmouth is ready to expand and [the other bases] can accommodate it,” Gatta said. “They articulated that very well.”

The merger would also ensure an uninterrupted flow of CECOM products to soldiers in the field who depend upon them for survival, Gatta said.

A recent Harris Poll taken of Fort Monmouth employees has shown that 20 percent of CECOM’s 5,000-plus civilian workers or “only one in five employees” would relocate to Maryland, Gatta stressed.

Tarantolo believes that the idea of adding the fort into the megabase is an effective compromise.

When the Pentagon tried to shut down Fort Monmouth twice before, base advocates recommended similar cost-saving strategies that were accepted by the BRAC commissioners evaluating those proposals.

This group of four BRAC commissioners, three of whom have actually toured Fort Monmouth since early June, seemed impressed with the New Jersey delegation’s arguments, Tarantolo said.

“I think we hit a home run,” he said.

Besides Tarantolo and Gaffney, who chairs the Governor’s Commission on New Jersey’s Military Bases, U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Jon Corzine (both D-N.J.) and U.S. Reps. Frank Pallone (D-6) and Rush Holt (D-12) testified at the more than two-hour regional hearing.