The Times Record- No-cost Transfer Option Survives

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Language allowing civilian reuse planners to acquire closing military base properties at no cost is part of a compromise defense spending bill forged by U.S. House and Senate negotiators Wednesday.

Conferees from the two legislative chambers finished their work reconciling differences between the House and Senate versions of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill late Wednesday afternoon.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the only member of the Maine delegation involved with the conference negotiations, told The Times Record the bill includes a provision that allows the military to give decommissioned military properties to civilian planners for little or no cost, as long as the planners can demonstrate local economic hardships.

The wording aims to benefit the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, which hopes to take over the Brunswick Naval Air Station property for as little cost as possible after the Navy departs in 2011. Under federal law in place when the Base Realignment and Closure commission voted in 2005 to close BNAS, the Defense Department was obligated to seek market value for the properties it was vacating, regardless of local conditions. That provision, which was not in place during past BRAC rounds, would add millions in acquisition costs to civilian redevelopment efforts.

"I think this changes things -- a lot," Steve Levesque, executive director of MRRA, said Wednesday. "It opens the door for us to get a low- or no-cost (economic development conveyance) based on the economic conditions in the area, and because of the investments we'll have to make in the base in order to redevelop it."

Conference negotiations

Coming into House-Senate conference negotiations, the House version of the defense bill included a provision introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, that called for all closing bases to be turned over to civilian redevelopment groups for no cost. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, introduced similar language in the Senate draft, but Snowe's measure was weakened before the Senate bill moved on to the conference committee for reconciliation.

In the end, no-cost conveyance language that reached the final bill was considered a compromise between Pingree's no-cost mandate and the weaker Senate wording.

"I'm happy that it stayed included in the bill," Pingree said Wednesday night in a telephone interview from Washington. "I would have felt more comfortable with the House language, because it required the Secretary (of Defense) to use no-cost (conveyances), but this certainly gives the secretary the latitude to do no-cost (conveyances). I'm thrilled that it's in there. I would have been happier with the House version, but that's the nature of conference committees and negotiations. From what I understand, there were some long, difficult negotiations in the Senate on this. So in some ways, we're lucky it wasn't taken out completely."

Although the version of the bill that emerged from the conference talks doesn't include verbiage as strong as what Pingree introduced in the House, the compromise might be better suited to pass muster with President Barack Obama. The president, who must sign the bill into law, has opposed blanket no-cost base conveyances.

The conference report faces routine approvals by the full House and Senate, likely in votes to be taken next week, before landing on Obama's desk.

"The president has been opposed to having conveyances of former base properties below market rates, much less at no cost, even for economic development reasons," Collins said Wednesday evening in a telephone interview from Washington. "That made it hard to get the language included in conference. I do think the language was sufficient to send a very strong signal to the Department of Defense that they can and should look at transferring the properties at below market value or at no cost."

Collins acknowledged that the bill doesn't guarantee low- or no-cost transfers, as the Defense Department still holds final discretion, but Levesque still touted the bill as a great leap forward compared to the department's prior policy.

"It'll give us a much greater opportunity than we had under the previous legislation to make a case for a low- or no-cost (economic development conveyance)," he said. "We do have to make that case, but we have no problem doing that. This is a directive from Congress, saying (to the Defense Department and Navy), ‘We want you to look at these things -- we want to you consider these things.'"

Past efforts, ‘paradigm shift'

If the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill gains Obama's signature, it will cap at least two years of work by Maine's congressional delegation to soften the Defense Department's 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) directive to seek market value for its closing bases.

Past rounds of base closures dating back to the early 1990s did not include such a directive, and communities looking to redevelop base properties were given control of those former military parcels for free.

Snowe initially pushed to apply the no-cost conveyance option to the 2005 round two years ago. However, her plan encountered stiff resistance in Congress. In a Wednesday night statement, Snowe said she is "pleased" many of her goals finally reached fruition, and called the news "a victory for Brunswick Naval Air Station."

"This is a tremendous paradigm shift that will take the focus back to economic redevelopment by communities and away from the maximum profit by the (Defense Department)," Snowe said in her statement. "While it is true that no-cost (economic development conveyances) are presently allowed, the expectation of fair market value has weighed heavily during prolonged negotiations to determine the exact cost of a piece of land."

Opponents of the measure argue that giving away potentially valuable base properties strips the federal government of revenue it can use to fund the environmental cleanups of the bases being abandoned.

Also, as Collins said Wednesday, "There was a feeling among some members of Congress, as well as the president, that developers were getting too good a deal on former base properties."

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