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Mission Growth
The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process allows the Department of Defense to transform its infrastructure to meet the future needs of the military. As a result of this process, some communities will experience an increase in military activity and associated community growth. An increase in military activity may challenge a community’s capacity to absorb an influx of personnel and may place excessive demands on some off-base community services and facilities. Previous experience suggests off-base housing scarcity and school over-crowding have been areas of shared community and military concern.
Communities announced as receiving locations within the BRAC process can respond by gaining an understanding of likely affects and establishing a cooperative partnership between the local installation and the affected community. In some cases, it will be clear that growth in the community can be readily accommodated. In other cases, such a clear understanding is not always the case. In those instances, creating a community growth management plan is important. This can be accomplished by forming an organization to assess the likely impacts, plan for the community’s response and implement any identified activities. Local business leaders, representatives from the local school district, community facility and service providers, neighborhood organizations and local elected officials can be brought together to establish such an organization and formulate a community adjustment strategy. Because there is no surplus property available for reuse, there is no requirement for recognizing a local “growth” organization or statutory need for outreach to homeless providers.
The local community’s role in responding to installation growth is to provide leadership, provide public information, identify potential issues and opportunities, develop an adjustment strategy and plan, and to implement the plan using local, State and Federal resources. OEA can provide technical and financial assistance for growth management planning to State and local governments who have been significantly adversely impacted by the rapid population growth from new or expanding missions at existing installations. For further information please see Managing Community Growth, Technical Bulletin 5.
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