Anyone who was living and working in Aroostook County in 1991 can probably tell you exactly where they were when the news broke that Loring Air Force Base was shutting down.
The base had survived two previous rounds of military base closures in the late 1980s, but in July 1991, all appeals and options had run out. The federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission had made its final recommendation, and on Sept. 30, 1994, the base that once housed more than 10,000 military personnel and their dependents and played a pivotal role in the Cold War officially closed.
By 1993, that scenario was the reality, and all efforts turned to mitigating the economic fallout by finding new uses for the base and creating new jobs.
For Mary Saunders, a Limestone native and the retiring administrative assistant at the Loring Commerce Centre, there was never a time when the base was not part of the northern Maine social, economic and political landscape.
Built in 1947 on 14,500 contiguous and remote acres in Limestone, Caswell and Caribou, the base was first known as the Limestone Army Air Field. It became the Limestone Air Force Base in 1950 and, four years later, it was renamed in honor of Korean War Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Charles J. Loring.
It was one of the largest Strategic Air Command bases in the country, housing bombardment and refueling wings in support of the country’s military readiness efforts during the Cold War and later during active campaigns with Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.
By the time the base shut down, it occupied about 8,700 acres.
The large bombers and other military aircraft could land and take off using the base’s 3-mile-long runway, which was the closest such facility to Europe on the Atlantic seaboard.
But beyond the planes, weapons and personnel was the infrastructure that supported it.
“It was awesome,” Saunders said. “Here on the base there were lots of people, lots of kids, and business was good.”
About 10,000 military personnel and their families called Loring home, and Saunders said everything they needed was right on the base, including a hospital, fire department, movie theater, sewage treatment plant, heating plants, 75 miles of roads, veterinary clinic, grocery store, chapel, automotive repair shop, banks, golf course, swimming pool, clothing store and a commissary.
“Once they were on base, the GIs never really had to leave,” she said. “The only thing they did not have was a car dealership.”
That did not mean, however, those same GIs did not spend a great deal of time and money in the surrounding communities shopping for goods and services.
“I remember Mondays were always paydays, and I’d stop in at the Burger King in Caribou,” said 73-year-old Carl Newland of Caribou. “All you’d see in there was khaki.”
Newland was one of the 1,000 civilians who had good-paying jobs on the base that also were lost two decades ago when the base shut down. Those civilian jobs, which had a total annual payroll of $38.5 million, paid far better than equivalent positions off the base.
“I haven’t worked since,” Newland said.
Life and jobs after Loring
In 1993, to offset the coming base closure, the Maine Legislature formed the Loring Development Authority to create jobs and new economic activity on the base. The public entity, overseen by a 13- member board of trustees, later renamed the base The Loring Commerce Centre.
As certain milestones in environmental cleanup were realized, the Air Force, over several years through 2004, transferred ownership of 3,700 acres to the Loring Development Authority and another 4,700 acres of wilderness land on the base to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to create the Aroostook National Wildlife Refuge.
“Although we all recognized that our economy would hit bottom soon after Loring’s closure, as was borne out by an unemployment rate in our region of approximately 17 percent in 1995, the Loring Development Authority resisted the temptation to find the quick fix that would not have long-term sustainability,” Brian Hamel, then president of the Loring Development Authority, said in 2002.
“The immediate and biggest challenge (in 1995) was to find occupants for all those empty buildings,” Carl Flora, the Loring Development Authority president, said recently. “We also had to keep the infrastructure intact so they would be usable when people showed interest.
“Let’s face it, Loring is in a remote location,” he said. “We didn’t have the advantage of an economy that was vibrant and stood alone on its own two feet without the base.”
Loring Development Authority members “attended a lot of trade shows, industry conferences and talked with a lot of companies to create awareness of Loring,” said Flora, who was vice president of the authority for nine years before taking the reigns when Hamel left in 2004. “Eventually, the phones started ringing.”
At first the calls were from individuals looking to reopen service-related businesses on the base such as the golf course, campground, fitness center and child care facility, Flora said.
But in 1995, a major player entered the scene when the Defense Finance Accounting System took over the base hospital and brought in 200 jobs. By 2013, the DFAS employed 540 people handling finance and accounting services for Air National Guard units around the world.
“That hospital was brand-new,” Flora said. “The Air Force spent $3.3 million building it in 1988, (and the Defense Finance Accounting System) moving in was a great reuse of that facility.”
In 1997, the Maine Army National Guard came calling with 20 jobs and a vision to create “a center of excellence” at Loring repairing and rebuilding military Humvee vehicles, Flora said. In 2001, the operation was turned over to the Maine Military Authority.
“Over time, they saw some real success,” Flora said. “Their numbers grew, and pretty soon every time you looked up here, you saw a Humvee coming at you.”
So widespread were the vehicles in the late 1990s into the next decade that Saunders said it was almost like the old days.
“It was reminiscent of the old Loring at shift change,” she said. “When people were leaving and coming in, you did not want to be out dawdling in the road.”
At the height of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, Flora said, Maine Military Authority was employing more than 500 people to armor the Humvees to make them resistant to roadside bombs.
With the drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, the demand for armored Humvees dried up, Flora said, and Maine Military Authority now employs about 125 as it branches out into repairing civilian vehicles such as trolleybuses.
Also in 1997, Job Corps, a U.S. Department of Labor program offering career and technical advanced training for youths, came in and took over nine buildings on the base, including former barracks and classrooms, while bringing in 130 jobs.
A third major employer, Sitel Corp., a call center providing customer services for other companies, moved into the former grocery store at Loring in 1998. It currently employs 200 people.
In 2008, a successful Canadian sign printing business that had moved onto the base four years earlier fell victim to the global financial crisis and was forced to close its operations and lay off 50 employees.
“It’s tough to see things like that happen,” Flora said. “But they did have a good experience here and continue to speak positively about us.”
Now, the Loring Development Authority provides “landlord” services to 24 businesses that collectively employ about 1,100 people.
All told, Flora said, the combined payroll of the existing large and small businesses taking up 1.6 million square feet — about half the available space at Loring — is about $40 million.
The Loring Development Authority, which employs 18 paid staffers, has an annual operating budget of just over $3 million. It gets about 50 percent of its operating revenue from leasing about 80 buildings to tenants with another 30 percent from the state and about 10 percent from fees charged for other services.
Phishing for income
As creative as the Loring Development Authority members were in tossing out ideas for development in the early years, not even they anticipated who would come calling in 1997.
“We got this call out of nowhere from the promoter of the band Phish,” Flora said. “Concerts were not on our radar screen at all and had never even occurred to us.”
The popular Vermont band wanted to come to Limestone and use the base’s 3-mile-long flight line to stage a weekend concert event.
“We had a bit of an uphill climb convincing people this was a good idea,” Flora said. “Especially when they began hearing there could be tens of thousands of fans coming.”
Flora admitted going into the concert negotiations with Phish “with a fair amount of trepidation,” but he said the promoters made a good argument for bringing the band north.
“Then we started hearing about the band’s followers,” he said. “We were wondering, ‘What are these people like? Will Loring be in shambles after they leave?’”
Phish fans, such as those of the Grateful Dead of the 1970s and ’80s, follow the group from town to town camping out in a sort of festival atmosphere.
“We were assured by the organizers these are a peaceful group of people,” Flora said. “We asked about drugs, and the reply we got was, ‘It’s a concert.’”
As the date of “The Great Went” concert grew closer, Flora said, they began to hear of massive pre-sold ticket numbers exceeding 45,000.
“A lot of people did not believe that many people would come here,” he said. “We did our best to prepare them.”
In the end, between 60,000 and 70,000 peaceful “Phish Phans” descended on Loring, backing traffic up almost to Caribou as they drove onto the old base and making Loring, for a brief time, the largest city in Maine.
“It was really something to see,” said Saunders, who camped out with her son during the concert in a special area reserved for Loring Development Authority employees. “It worked out really, really well.”
So well, that after pumping about $25 million into the northern Maine economy with “The Great Went,” Phish returned in 1998 for “Lemon Wheel” and again in 2003 for “ It,” bringing another $40 million combined to the area.
The next 20 years
In 2000, the Loring Development Authority hit its milestone of creating 1,000 civilian jobs on the base, replacing those lost when Loring shut down.
Unfortunately, Flora said, things have stalled since then.
“I’d like to not be hanging out at 1,000 jobs,” he said. “We need to start putting our focus and efforts on getting good manufacturing jobs here.”
Aroostook County has a solid base of skilled workers who could fill manufacturing jobs, and there is still usable building space on the base suitable for that, Flora said.
“We know we have the local talent, and we have the infrastructure,” Flora said. “It’s a real waste not to engage it.”
Talks are in the works with the Chinese manufacturer China North Industries Group Corp., known as Norinco, to manufacture railcars on the former base. The company could contract with the Maine Military Authority. But nothing will happen, Flora said, until the rail industry updates and approves new rail safety standards in the wake of recent disasters such as the one in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in 2013.
Also, Flora said the available data technology on the base is second to none, and the airport runway remains active as an additional business incentive.
However, there is no denying time has taken its toll on some of the 1.5 million square feet of building space that still remains vacant.
“Certainly there are several commercial buildings that are no longer suitable for redevelopment,” Flora said. “They are so far gone, we’d really have to weigh the pros and cons of bringing them back into service as opposed to new construction on a fresh site or adapting another building.”
Other buildings that are in relatively good shape no longer fit the model of a workplace environment.
“A lot of those tend to be the office-style buildings, and the mix of jobs we see today are not geared to individual office work,” Flora said. “Even though there are a lot of desk-type jobs they are in more open-space-concept type facilities.”
At some point among his long-term plans, Flora said, is applying for federal funds to take down some of those buildings that have no promising future.
“There is a list of those buildings,” he said. “But then sometimes, someone shows up, and one of those on the list is the perfect spot for them, so that list is never final until the bulldozers show up.”
The Loring Development Authority continues to heat some of the vacant buildings based on their potential for reuse.
“How long will we keep doing that?” Flora said. “It’s hard to say. But I guess we will keep at it until those buildings are reused or are clearly not usable any longer.”
Twenty years ago, those looking to salvage jobs from the ashes of what was Loring Air Force Base were facing a tough battle, and Flora said those challenges have not gone away, but he remains optimistic as he looks ahead.
“Things could come back to the way they were before it closed, (but) we still have a long ways to go for that to be the case,” he said. “If there were between 2,500 and 3,000 jobs here all held by people who live in the area, we might be pretty close to the same (economic) impact the base had.” FOR MORE, see the Bangor Daily News at www.bangordailynews.com
A look at Loring
— BUILT IN 1947 on 14,500 contiguous and remote acres in Limestone, Caswell and Caribou, the base was first known as the Limestone Army Air Field. It became the Limestone Air Force Base in 1950 and, four years later, it was renamed in honor of Korean War Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Charles J. Loring.
— IT WAS ONE OF the largest Strategic Air Command bases in the country, housing bombardment and refueling wings in support of the country’s military readiness efforts during the Cold War.
— ABOUT 10,000 MILITARY personnel and their families called Loring home and everything they needed was right on the base, including a hospital, fire department, movie theater, sewage treatment plant, heating plants, 75 miles of roads, veterinary clinic, grocery store, chapel, automotive repair shop, banks, golf course, swimming pool, clothing store and a commissary.
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