Vice chiefs of the Air Force and Army signed an agreement Friday finalizing the long-planned move. The bases, to be renamed Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, will begin merging Jan. 31, with the transition scheduled to be completed by October 2010.
Air Force Col. Jeffery Vinger, the provisional joint base commander, said the move won't translate into job cuts for the more than 3,000 civilians employed by the Army and Air Force at the bases, but it will mean some of their paychecks will be coming from the Air Force rather than the Army.
"Both sides essentially share a lot of the same type services," Vinger said. "Somewhere down the line, we may be able to generate some kind of efficiencies through the combining of those services, looking at efficiencies of scale in like contracts."
There are 1,284 civilian personnel at Elmendorf and 1,786 at Fort Richardson, Vinger said. Under the merger plan, about 1,200 of the civilian Army employees -- those working in support services -- would be transferred to become Air Force civilians to provide the services jointly for the installation, he said.
Those services include everything from food services and recreational facilities to property management, road maintenance and emergency personnel. About 13 soldiers, many of them chaplains, will be filling joint billets because of the merger, Vinger said.
What does all that look like to the average person on base? Not much, according to military officials.
"It should be transparent to everybody," Fort Richardson spokesman Bob Hall said. "That's the whole idea is it should be transparent. There's not going to be any change of services. It's just going to all come under one installation."
The commander of U.S. Army Garrison Fort Richardson, Col. Timothy Prior, will become deputy commander of the joint base. The new commander will be an Air Force colonel who probably will be named in February or March.
"This union formalizes an already close working relationship the Air Force and Army have shared for years; working closely together under Alaskan Command," Prior said in a statement.
Elmendorf and Fort Richardson are among 26 other installations across the country being combined into 12 joint bases to run more efficiently. In Hawaii, Naval Station Pearl Harbor and Hickam Air Force Base announced a merger in August. Fort Lewis and McCord Air Force Base in Washington will also join forces.
The bases were singled out for consolidation in 2005 during the military's Base Realignment and Closure Act. In an e-mailed statement Tuesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the consolidation and transition has been going smoothly since then.
"As a result of the consolidation, the bases should run more efficiently, which means that more money and attention can be devoted to the missions and less to duplicate operations functions," Murkowski, R-Alaska, said.
Although designed to make operations more efficient, the move will not equate to job cuts, Vinger said. In fact, the base will be understaffed by Department of Defense standards by about 150 positions when the merger is complete, he said.
Asked how hiring more people could make operations more efficient, Vinger said, "The office of Secretary of Defense didn't direct us to generate any savings through this process. At this point, it's really a matter of joining both installations and then looking into the future where we might be able to generate savings because of those efficiencies that have been put into place through the joining."
Though its relative importance to the local economy has declined somewhat over the years with the growth of other industries, the military has been and continues to be a major player, particularly in construction, said state labor economist Neal Fried.
"Generally speaking, the military's been growing in Anchorage," Fried said. "It's been growing pretty significantly. In recent years it's been one of the growth sectors in Anchorage's economy. It's probably one of the few that's growing right now."
Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.
Base merger at a glance
• Elmendorf civilian personnel: 1,284
• Fort Richardson civilian personnel: 1,786
• Number of Army civilian support personnel to be transferred to the Air Force: About 1,200
• Examples of job services being transferred: fire and emergency; public works; environmental management; property management; road and ground maintenance; snow removal; housing management; child care; recreational
Important warning about e-mails purporting to be from the adn.com staff.