BRAC, BRAC, BRAC. It’s the four-letter word that has, undoubtedly, spawned the overuse of other four-letter words. And, no doubt, will spawn the continued overuse as BRAC becomes reality in Harford County.
By one account, we have fewer than 914 days to be BRAC-ready. What is BRAC? What will BRAC mean for Harford County? How will we know when BRAC is here? How will our lives change? Those questions and more need to be answered in real terms - especially dollars - before too much longer.
It’s great there’s all of these committees - in the state government, in the Harford County government and in the private sector - getting ready for BRAC, but unless they find a grove of money trees, their reports won’t be worth much more than the paper they’ll be printed on.
For us, BRAC primarily means we can expect a lot of jobs to be relocated or created here with the closing of Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Thousands and thousands of new jobs, so they say, will take over Aberdeen Proving Ground and our communities.
I have long suspected that BRAC is going to be a big thing for Harford County. As someone who grew up in Havre de Grace, I’ve lived through all the fears of losing some of the missions, down-sizing the operation or closing APG altogether. My grandfather worked on post, so did my grandmother, as did countless other people I knew. My late uncle tested Cobra helicopters at APG in the late 1960s.
It’s a whole lot better to know there’s a bunch of stuff coming here, rather than worrying about what we might be losing at APG (though I’m not too crazy about the idea of not only losing so many soldiers, but also that great museum at APG. Isn’t it great that APG has been home to Anzio Annie all these years?)
APG has been a bustling place for most of my life, though not so much in recent years. When I think of BRAC, I think of the vitality returning to APG, a vitality that’s been missing in recent years. Certainly, it will be a different kind of vitality - a wholly civilian employee population is clearly different from the mix of civilians and soldiers that has been APG’s history - but it will be a vitality nonetheless.
How many jobs? Thousands, but beyond that, who knows? Maybe we’ll get back to the day when everyone knows a whole lot of someones who work at APG, or at one of the support contractors. That hasn’t been the case in recent years.
How many houses will need to be built? County Executive David R. Craig has said that on any given day there are 5,000 housing units for sale in Harford County. Beyond that, who knows?
What I do know is that things need to change if we’re going to change in a meaningful way to accommodate BRAC the way we should. We need to build roads and schools. But we also need to improve our transportation. We need to make rail service a centerpiece of any plans to get the additional workers on and off post.
Not too long ago, former Aberdeen Mayor Fred Simmons, showed me and some of my colleagues a wonderful plan for a transportation hub built along the Amtrak line off of Philadelphia Road on the back side of the Wal-Mart store. It looked like a great plan to me, but it will take money to build it.
Money is something the state has no trouble taking from us, especially in ever-increasing amounts. But the state isn’t as quick to give any of it back. Our schools - with or without BRAC’s arrival - need work, lots of it. But the state has turned its back on us when we’ve asked for money to do what needs to be done to our schools. The state has been equally stingy when it comes to highway money.
All of that has to change, or our cries of “BRAC, BRAC, BRAC” will be cries of pain. Financial ones.
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