NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.-In its heyday, the Charleston Naval Base was a sight to behold.
Established in 1902, it served the nation through two World Wars and many regional conflicts, eventually becoming the Navy's third-largest homeport behind San Diego and Norfolk, Va. For decades, Navy ships and submarines would slip into enormous dry docks for maintenance and repairs, or would park themselves at one of the 21 piers that jut into a 3-mile stretch of the Cooper River. Over the course of a century, thanks to the haphazard needs of the Navy, the 1,600-acre complex sprouted a jumble of 600 architecturally diverse buildings.
Then, in 1993, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission announced that Charleston would be its odd port out: The base would close by 1996. Though the news was not entirely unexpected, it rocketed through Charleston like a torpedo. "It was considered devastating to the community," recalls Richard K. Gregory, a local businessman who was involved in the fight to keep the base open. "You had 30,000 Navy people and 6,000 to 8,000 civilian jobs at the base, with people obviously living and spending locally. In areas like North Charleston, which had a heavy concentration of shipyard people, the thinking was that it would cause ruin."
But seven years after the closure announcement, Charleston-area officials say the blow was nowhere near as bad as expected. Indeed, Charleston has had much more success redeveloping its shipyard than have other communities that lost similar facilities. The National Association of Installation Developers, a Washington-based group that studies base-closing issues, found last year that Charleston created more jobs-3,441-on its shuttered base than any other locality did. That total outdistanced the second-highest, in Sacramento, Calif., by almost 1,000 jobs. Since then, the number of jobs at the Charleston shipyard has grown further, to more than 4,200, and that figure doesn't count rapid job growth just outside the base's boundaries.
In one sense, the revival in North Charleston remained true to the base's legacy of steel and ships, with most of the jobs coming in heavy manufacturing and distribution. In another sense, however, the rebirth proved to be a break from the region's past. Although South Carolina's political clout in Washington secured more than 1,000 new and relocated federal jobs for the base after the Navy left, the remainder of the new jobs-about two-thirds of the on-site work force-is in the private sector, spread among more than 70 companies.
Officials express relief that the days of dependence on one employer are over. "In hindsight, the closing of the base was a wake-up call that we can't sit back on our laurels and depend on the federal government to furnish jobs," said North Charleston Mayor R. Keith Summey. His counterpart in Charleston, Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., agreed that something good came out of crisis: "We have a stronger economy now than ever."
In fact, area officials boast that their approach was designed from the outset to be different. Unlike leaders in some other communities, Charleston-area officials decided not to fight an open-ended battle to keep the base alive, or to rely on a single corporate savior. As soon as the base's fate became clear, local officials held a joint news conference to announce that they had a forward-looking plan. As it happened, Summey acknowledges now, that statement was a half-truth, because they did not have a plan yet. (They were working on one, he explains, and "perception is two-thirds of reality.") But the announcement's message was clear: Rather than spending all their time lobbying for salvation from the Pentagon's bureaucracy, "we had to regroup and face it head-on," Summey recalled.
The first order of business was to convene a committee made up of all the affected parties. That proved to be difficult at first. "Prior to the base-closure announcement, if you'd gotten the leaders of the three counties and the localities together, you would have needed a weapons check at the door," Summey says. "That harmed all of us. Now we work well together. We may disagree, but that's the way families are. We never lose sight of the primary objective." (For an opposite example, see Base closure stalemate ends in Myrtle Beach (April 21).) Eventually, fear pushed civic leaders to create two economic development entities. One, the Charleston Regional Development Alliance, boosts the region's economic prospects as a whole; its funding comes from local government and business groups. The second eventually became known as the Charleston Naval Complex Redevelopment Authority; its job is to attract new companies to set up shop on the base itself. Initially funded by the Navy, the authority's budget now comes from a share of the tenants' lease payments.
Officials understood that attracting companies to the base would be a challenge. For one thing, the site is saddled with environmental hazards, such as lead in the groundwater. Because of such hazards, the Navy can't turn over deeds to the land-something most businesses prefer-until a cleanup is complete. (In late February, the Navy signed a $28 million contract with an Atlanta company that promises to speed the cleanup process.) In addition, most of the parcels at the yard are expensive to redevelop because the buildings are old and many are unusual. "Most of the buildings didn't meet building codes," explains businessman Gregory. "They didn't have to because the Navy was exempt."
Despite these obstacles, officials moved rapidly to sign new tenants, in part because they knew that waterfront facilities would deteriorate rapidly if they were not maintained. "If we hadn't acted quickly, I'm not sure we ever could have created enough momentum to go forward," Gregory said. Officials signed the first lease on Oct. 6, 1995, several months before the Navy set sail for good. By 1996, when the base closed, 500 new employees were already working on site.
The first company to sign up was Gregory's Charleston Marine Manufacturing Corp., a successor to two well-established ship-repair companies that had moved to the base from much smaller facilities in Charleston. The predecessor companies had long gotten a piece of the Navy's business, but that was suddenly gone. To replace the lost business, Gregory and other executives turned to the commercial ship-repair market.
Fortunately for the company, shipborne trade was a growing sector, thanks to the growth of South Carolina's industrial export market, most of which passes through the bustling Port of Charleston, just down the river. "We looked at the shipyard not from the point of what had been done here, but what could be done here," Gregory said. "Even though the critics said that shipbuilding was dead, we discovered that there was very little commercial ship repair in the Southeast. Ships that sail to the Caribbean and South America would either have to go to Norfolk or the Gulf of Mexico coast. Sailing days are very valuable to shipowners, so some come to us."
With one major new tenant in hand, base-redevelopment officials went looking for more. Because the region had a surplus of underemployed blue-collar workers, officials focused first on luring manufacturing and distribution jobs. Such jobs typically pay well and they also balance Charleston's increasingly tourist-based, service economy. "We tried to aggressively bring in industries that could use trade skills-welders, pipe fitters, and other skilled laborers-in a right-to-work state," Summey said.
Officials also recruited companies to set up shop near-but not inside-the Navy base. Since the recruiting effort began, 99 companies have settled in the region. Their presence has led to $2.2 billion in direct capital investment and 10,000 jobs, said David T. Ginn, the president and CEO of the Charleston Regional Development Alliance. The newcomers range from steel manufacturer Nucor Corp. and housewares maker Mikasa to truck manufacturer Western Star Trucks. In addition, five new telemarketing companies employ a total of 1,000 people.
Like other economic development campaigns, the Charleston effort dangled tax incentives to lure out-of-state companies. But regional officials made sure their pitch included additional enticements. "We played up our low taxes, our beaches, fishing, the historic district in Charleston, the retail establishment, and amenities people like to have, like good golf courses," Summey said. North Charleston-a town of 80,000 people with something of an inferiority complex about its pastel-hued, older sibling to the south-even raised its profile by building a convention center, coliseum, hotel, and performing arts hall.
Also helping Charleston was the continued clout of the state's congressional delegation, especially Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C. Senators and Representatives helped secure new nonmilitary federal jobs, including postal facilities, the U.S. Border Patrol's training school, and accounting centers for the departments of State and Defense. Still, officials are much more pleased with the surge in private-sector employment. Not only have the new private workers boosted local home construction rates and reduced unemployment, they have also packed a bigger economic punch than their Navy predecessors, many of whom spent large chunks of their income on base, rather than in the community. "In retrospect, it was almost a no-brainer," says political scientist Bill Moore of the College of Charleston. "Choice land in the Sun Belt? It was like, `Get the Navy out of here and we will boom.' It turned out to be a blessing."
Officials acknowledge that not everything has worked perfectly. Now that the best (and most easily redeveloped) properties at the former base are already leased, slower, and often more-expensive, progress is ahead. Some companies that moved to North Charleston failed to prosper and eventually shut their doors. Moreover, the region's next goal-to attract high-technology workers-is daunting, especially because Charleston lacks a hub airport. (Summey said he would like to see 12,000 workers on base in the coming years-three times the current number, but even that total would be far smaller than the number of people who worked there during the Navy's peak years.) And despite the region's strong growth, pockets of recession persist, especially in predominantly minority neighborhoods near the base.
Still, officials are confident that the rapid private-sector expansion has seen the region through its toughest stretch. Although Charleston Marine remains the largest employer on the base, Gregory now touts the site's economic diversity, and he advises other communities that "trying to hit the home run-having one company come into a base and take over everything-is a mistake, because former military facilities are not designed with private-sector efficiency in mind. You also don't want one large user leaving."
So good is the current climate here that visitors can sometimes hear officials saying they're glad that the Navy left-before they catch themselves, chastened. "With perfect foresight, I still would not have called for the closing, because we still experienced the trauma and tragedy of people losing their jobs," Charleston Mayor Riley said. "We did take lemons and made lemonade out of them. But all things being equal, I wouldn't have asked for a bag of lemons to begin with."