Massive Fort Bliss Expansion Revitalizing Outlook For El Paso

By PAUL MEYER / The Dallas Morning News

EL PASO – Near the end of a freshly cut six-lane highway, bulldozers and steel beams lay siege to Chihuahuan Desert.

A small city is rising on the sand, part of the largest expansion of any military base in America. In all, tens of thousands of new troops and their families are coming to Fort Bliss over the next five years.

And El Paso – long saddled with a reputation as sun-scorched and poverty-stricken – is preparing for economic high times even amid a national downturn. Home foreclosures inside the city fell 17 percent last year, and home prices are still rising, albeit less than the dramatic clip of the past couple of years, according to industry data.

“I think what you’ll end up seeing is the face of El Paso really changing very dramatically,” Mayor John Cook said from his 10th-floor office, where windows rattle with the passing trains that first made El Paso a Western boomtown more than a century ago.

“We are ready. The community is ready. We’ve been preparing for this since 2005.” The troop influx – driven by an Army growth plan announced in December and the Pentagon’s 2005 Base Realignment and Closure recommendations – will push Fort Bliss’ population of troops and family members from 24,660 in 2005 to 90,418 by the end of 2012.

That includes more than 13,500 children forecast to enter local schools. In response, local officials have already issued hundreds of millions of dollars in school bonds, opened the world’s largest inland water desalination plant and begun wooing dozens of defense contractors to town.

But the most significant activity is yet to come, economists say, with most construction and population increases expected from 2009 through 2011. More than $4 billion in construction is planned on-base, with an additional demand for 20,000 apartments and homes off-base in the city.

“This is maybe the first time when there’s a national slowdown when El Paso’s not the first one in and the last one out,” said Dennis Soden, executive director of the Institute for Policy and Economic Development at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Dr. Soden compares the Fort Bliss impact with Boeing in Seattle, a massive economic engine whose impact is just beginning. The troop growth is part of the military’s global troop repositioning that has also made the base home to testing for Future Combat Systems.

That program, including trials of futuristic unmanned weaponry, will be a strong attraction for defense contractors and accompanying high-wage jobs, local officials say. “We are probably one of the few places in the country that has anything close to a construction boom going on,” Dr. Soden said.

A revitalized reputation Leon Metz, a 77-year-old El Paso historian and radio host who moved here with the Air Force in 1948, said the Bliss boom has already opened a new chapter in the city’s story, marked by a level of optimism he hasn’t seen before.

“The only question, as I see it,” he said, “is where is it going to end and when does it end? “What changes are we going to see?”

On a recent Thursday afternoon driving tour of the city, Chamber of Commerce president Richard Dayoub snaked along the border highway, bracketed by the Rio Grande and Ciudad Jurez to the south and the brawny, brown Franklin Mountains to the north.

“It’s almost as vast as your eye can consume,” he said, pointing to the sprawling growth and new subdivisions on the horizon. Mr. Dayoub said he hasn’t seen the economy so vibrant in his 37 years living in the city.

But he knows perceptions die slowly. For years, El Paso’s reputation has largely become its name: a dusty frontier pass-through with long memories of double-digit unemployment and the post-NAFTA flight of garment and manufacturing jobs across the border.

The kind of place you visit out of necessity rather than desire. “That’s been the perception for as long as I can remember,” Mr. Dayoub said. Even the billboard on Interstate 10 bears traces of self-deprecation in touting the area’s natural attractions:

“Think there’s nothing to do here? Care to step outside?” The city still claims one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, but the unemployment rate has fallen steadily over the past decade to just 5.6 percent today.

Downtown there’s a new history museum and public library, but still no real tourist or entertainment district. The art deco Plaza Hotel, the first high-rise Hilton built in America, remains vacant, although there are whispers of redevelopment.

But not all are sold on the city’s direction or the development associated with the Fort Bliss surge. “I would say it’s a negative,” said author David Romo, a lifelong area resident and member of the group opposing the downtown redevelopment plans.

“I don’t think we have the infrastructure for that. I think it’s going to increase the violence in our city.” El Paso’s violent crime rate has remained one of the lowest among big cities in the country in recent years.

The downtown revitalization plans have earned vitriol from Mr. Romo and others concerned about the use of eminent domain and the gentrification of places like Segundo Barrio, an El Paso neighborhood.

Mr. Romo, whose most recent book looks at El Paso and Jurez during the Mexican Revolution, said it’s part of what he sees as developer-driven opportunism along the border. “You create this kind of bubble market for housing, and that bubble market everybody tries to take advantage of, all these developers,” he said.

But Mr. Cook, a Brooklyn native who came to El Paso with the military, said he has no intention of destroying the city’s past in creating its future. “You look at what El Paso was like from the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s. We were on a par with Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix, Tucson. We were a cultural destination point at that time,” the mayor said.

“I think we got complacent and people started promoting El Paso as a low-wage town. I mean, people used to brag, ‘Hey, you can get a maid here to work for $20 a week, and you can open a restaurant and put a help-wanted sign outside, and within a couple of hours you have a hundred people apply for a job.’

“That was something that philosophically built into the community over years and years and years.” Expansion, opportunity At Fort Bliss, workers are expected to complete the first of six new military complexes in August, each including housing for about 1,400 soldiers, dining facilities, company operations, vehicle-maintenance areas and headquarters buildings.

New parks, shops, chapels and a lifestyle center are planned for elsewhere on base. “I don’t wake up in the morning wondering what I’m going to do today,” said Clark McChesney, director of the base’s Team Bliss Base Transformation Office, which is supervising the growth.

“When this is all done, we will have about 27,000 folks working out in what used to be pretty much sand.” But lasting change, Mr. Cook and others say, will require an influx of higher-wage jobs – jobs they believe will come in the form of defense companies.

Bob Cook, president of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, said he is working with 32 defense contractors that are now looking at El Paso, mostly because of the growth at Fort Bliss and combat systems testing there. He said interest in the city has only accelerated since the beginning of the year.

“There is no single economic event that we could have contemplated as a community that had the kind of impact that this has,” said Mr. Cook, no relation to the mayor.

Bill Gilmer, vice president in charge of the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said the overall impact of Fort Bliss’ planned growth has been slower to materialize than some first expected, but should start ramping up next year.

“I think they’re quite right that it will bring at that level another kind of business to El Paso,” Mr. Gilmer said. “Now how to capitalize on that will be the problem.”

The base, a 1.12-million-acre spread that’s larger than Rhode Island and abuts White Sands in New Mexico, will be the nation’s fourth-largest Army installation in population by 2013, only slightly smaller than Fort Hood.

And the area will also benefit from local troops returning home from Iraq, including the recent homecoming of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.

Mr. McChesney, who said he never dreamed he would be living in El Paso when he first came in 1977, now finds himself meeting with mortgage bankers and homebuilders, talking about the growth ahead.

“They’re all excited about this, quite frankly. It is a great opportunity for the free-market economy to again step up and make a profit,” he said. “It’s a business opportunity, and it’s a fairly lucrative business opportunity.”

It was that opportunity that first brought Plano resident Rick Herzberger to El Paso for his job inspecting housing on the base. Now, after more than two years of regular visits, his perceptions of the city have changed.

“I tried to get my wife to go with me last time,” he said. “I said, ‘You know, it’s not too bad of a place.’ ”

(Copyright 2008 by The Dallas Morning News. All Rights Reserved.)