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Illinois Town Shows There Is Life After Base Closings : Conversion: Pentagon to showcase thriving Rantoul. California’s Victor Valley indicates perils of infighting.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Frank Elliott stormed into Dr. Norman Schutt’s new dental clinic six years ago and, in a fit of frustration, flung his hat across the room.

Just weeks earlier, he had guaranteed the dentist that the 70-year-old Chanute Air Force Base here would never close. A retired Air Force major general who once had been the base commander, Elliott was sure that the facility would not shut down.

“Norm,” he told the dentist, “not a chance.”

But on that day six years ago--Dec. 29, 1988--in the first of four rounds of post-Cold War military base closures, the Pentagon announced that Chanute would be scuttled. The news jarred little Rantoul, a prairie town on the old Illinois Central Railroad line. The jets were leaving. All that would be left were the corn and soybeans that surround Rantoul.

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But when Elliott threw his hat across the room, Schutt picked it up in a gesture of confidence.

Today the city is still picking up from what could have been--to some, should have been--its death knell. Jobs are increasing. The tax base is growing. The economy has diversified, and new plants, including an auto parts assembler and a window glazer, have located here. And Schutt’s clinic is thriving.

With a new round of base closures under consideration now, including the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, military officials in Washington, who insist that communities can survive the loss of a military installation, love to put city leaders like Mayor Katy Podagrosi of Rantoul on exhibit.

This afternoon, Podagrosi will be showcased in a special Pentagon meeting on how communities can pick up the pieces of a closed base.

“They’ve done extremely well in Rantoul,” said Paul Dempsey, director of the Office of Economic Adjustment at the Department of Defense. “They chased down a lot of leads and they worked very hard. They aggressively pursued marketing and they benefited from hard work and persistence. Basically, they all came together.”

The Pentagon meeting will emphasize the lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful base conversions. While Rantoul illustrates one side, the Victor Valley in California’s Mojave Desert represents the other.

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When George Air Force Base was ordered shut down, it led to fierce local infighting, which in turn led to millions of dollars in lawsuits and years of delays. Only now, six years after the base was placed on the closure list, are Victor Valley officials finally agreeing on what to do with runways that once echoed with the roar of F-4E Phantom jets.

“That is prime real estate out there in California,” said Erik Pages, director of the Commerce Department’s Office of Economic Conversion Information. “They’re the example of what not to do.”

Why does one community like Rantoul rise from the ashes of a base closure? Why do others like Victor Valley become consumed in local firestorms?

“Most local communities have done this pretty well,” Defense Secretary William J. Perry said in a speech in Washington last week to the National Assn. of Counties.

“They tend to recover economically and actually wind up, many of them, better off with a more diverse economy and more jobs.”

He noted that 88,000 federal jobs have been lost in base closings over the last three decades. “But 171,000 new jobs--nearly twice as many--were created in and around the bases after they closed.”

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Chase Field, a naval air station in Beeville, Tex., is an example. When the flag was lowered in 1993 at Chase, just under 1,000 civilian jobs dried up. But a year later, the community had picked up nearly 2,000 jobs after redevelopment officials persuaded light industries to move to the Gulf Coast region.

In contrast, officials in Philadelphia chose another course. They went to the U.S. Supreme Court to save the Navy’s historic shipyard there when it was slated in 1991 for closure. Four years were devoted to that effort. And they lost.

Only last month did the city announce that two leading ship repair companies have agreed to relocate on the Delaware River, a move that would replace only half of the 6,000 civilian jobs that left Philadelphia with the Navy.

The key to getting past a base closure, federal officials said, is for local officials to adopt a “dual tracking” community response. If they must, they should aggressively fight the closure. But, at the same time, they should immediately start planning for new uses.

“We urge you to hedge your bet,” Perry told the county officials. “Fight the closure if you must but be prepared for closure just in case. Have a Plan B.”

Here in Rantoul, Elliott and Mayor Podagrosi pressured Washington to save the base but also set up a reuse authority to immediately search for new businesses. A study from the University of Illinois warned that retail sales and housing values would plummet once the last plane left Chanute.

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“It was real bad,” said Elliott, now the city’s economic development consultant. “There was absolute anger and a feeling of betrayal. We were looking at real devastation.”

City leaders lobbied hard for a United Airlines maintenance terminal but lost out to Indianapolis. Undaunted, they continued the search and have begun filling up old hangar space with new business.

Tom Oliver-Cara, a supervisor at Rantoul Products Co., said that the auto parts builder now is running three shifts with 800 employees. “And here everybody thought the economy was going to fail.”

Podagrosi said that in many ways Rantoul is better off with a diverse economy now. “The idea was to save Rantoul, not to save the base.”

The tactics were different in Victor Valley. The four small cities there spent a combined $15 million in taxpayer money suing each other over how best to use the property. After more than two dozen separate lawsuits were filed in local, state and federal courts in Southern California, the city of Adelanto finally settled its grievances last month against a special development authority formed by the other three cities: Victorville, Hesperia and Apple Valley.

Adelanto at one time wanted to put a high-speed train station and a casino on the property, while the Victory Valley Economic Development Authority wanted to create a regional cargo airport. In the end, the authority got its airport. But replacement of the 14,000 military and civilian jobs at George Air Force Base remains years away, with the cargo airport just beginning service.

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“What happened here at George is not the way to do things,” conceded Dr. Gary Gray, a former Air Force colonel and dentist who now works as the base transition coordinator. “But we learned a hell of a lot. And we hope this local dispute never happens anywhere else.”

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