Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Mathew McElroy

Mathew McElroy is in a unique position: He works for the city in a job that is paid for by the Pentagon, and there are only about 15 like him in the country.

McElroy is El Paso's military growth and expansion coordinator. His job is to tackle city problems related to the ever-accelerating growth at Fort Bliss. One of his biggest tasks is putting together a regional growth management plan, or RGMP, for the city.

McElroy, 34, reported for work on April 1. Officially, he's paid by a grant the city received from the Office of Economic Adjustment, a division of the Department of Defense.

He works with a team of consultants from SAIC, a Fortune 500 company that works to study and solve problems in major issues like national security and healthcare. Together, they're putting together information to help city leaders determine what problems need attention first.

Luckily, two of the biggest ones – building the desalination plant and Spur 601 near Fort Bliss – have been addressed. But now McElroy is handling major items like school capacity, healthcare, housing, and leveraging the estimated $3.3 billion economic impact of the troop influx to create new industry.

McElroy pulled out his latest RGMP – that's regional growth management plan, remember? – to talk about what the future holds for El Paso. With the prospect of 20,000 soldiers living outside the gates of Fort Bliss by 2012, he has a lot to think about.

Q: The Base Realignment and Closure announcements came back in 2005. Are we getting a late start?
We are starting late, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, because some big things are out of the way: Spur 601 and the desalination plant. Also, El Paso Independent School District needed to pass a $230 million bond and they did.

Coming in late also let's us see what Fort Riley, Kan., did, what Fort Drum, N.Y., did and what Fort Bragg, N.C., did. And that gives us a 12-month track record of what worked and what didn't. We're going to learn from that.

Q: Do you consult with your counterparts at other Army posts?
I talk to the guy from Fort Riley because that post is growing a lot. They started their plan about a year and a half earlier than we did, and it's actually finished.

Q: Do they tell you what not to do?
Yes, especially in terms of some of the methodology we're using to estimate our population. We're lucky because we're learning from some of the things that didn't have predictability. We'll be able to do a much better job of seeing what the demands in certain industries will really be.

Q: How so?
When all the troops show up, we're talking about an impact of $3.3 billion. That's a lot of money, but only if you have it in the right industries. You don't want $3.3 billion in dogfood processing, for example.

Right now, we're not seeing a lot of things you can leverage into high-tech or science-based clusters. We're seeing restaurants, food and beverage stores, automotive repair, vehicle parts, dealers, clothing, childcare services, etc.

The question is how can you take that impact and leverage it in terms of other areas so you can build what you want, whether it's through recruiting defense contractors, or because you build hospitals and you have more doctors. Then maybe you can do research in a specific area.

Q: Is economic development something you do or something that just happens?
It's kind of weird. It's a mix of what happens by chance and what happens because you go out and get it. When the two work together, you get one of those regional growth miracles like Memphis, when they got FedEx, or when Austin got Dell. Everything else happened.

In our case, REDCo – El Paso's Regional Economic Development Corporation – is talking to a ton of companies, more than 80, and a bunch are defense contractors. If defense contractors start moving here, you're going to see a whole new kind of job creation that's different from the list of predicted jobs.

If that doesn't happen, we'll end up building a lot of low-wage, low skill-level occupations around the military impact. You don't want that. You want the military impact to leverage into other areas.

Q: How do you fit into the picture?
We're using a model to get an idea of what kinds of soldiers we'll be getting. Getting an infantry soldier is very different from getting an air defense soldier. They have different skills and might transition to different industries better.

We're lucky in that the lead for this growth plan is Tim Wittig who works for SAIC. He did all of the growth management planning for the entire state of Maryland. He understands the scope of the change we're getting. Tim is also a lawyer who specializes in technology transfer from Army to civilian or private use.

Q: When you get this type of information, do you go to REDCo?
Once we begin to develop it, we share it with REDCo and the Greater Chamber of Commerce so they can understand how to refine their targets or reach out into some of the areas we're finding out are going to be impacted.

Q: How do you develop the RGMP?
The city, the working groups we have and the committees working with our consultants look at 15 areas and 13 technical areas. What the different economic impacts are, what industries are the most effective?

We kind of have an idea of that already – future land use. Can we annex the land we need to continue to build housing? They're expecting 20,000 troops to be living outside the gate. Circulation and traffic – where are the bottlenecks going to be? What things can we do to alleviate those? Education, you name it.

All of those things we're going to look at to make sure we understand where the growing pains are going to be – then set up a plan, whether it's a fund problem or a space problem – putting in place things to mitigate those issues and then identify funding.

Q: Education seems to be a huge issue, especially in Socorro, where a recent bond issue failed.
In 2006, Fort Bliss estimated that 8,403 kids would be split up through the major districts. El Paso estimates that about 65 percent of them are going to go to EPISD. The farther out you get, obviously the fewer students you get.

But Socorro is at capacity right now. And when you project out to 2012, the density projection for Socorro changes dramatically. That's just military kids. And when you add to that what we can expect with normal growth, it's crazy. They need to pass a bond issue.

Q: What's your role in this issue?
Before I got here, Pat Adauto, the deputy city manager, set up an educational partners consortium with the universities and school districts to get them to understand the scope of the growth. That's been passed over to me and that group is working with the growth plan.

We coordinated a visit so that the school districts could talk with the Department of Defense to understand these impacts and the kinds of special needs that military students have.

What are the growth constraints that the local districts have? What can the federal government do in terms of funding? The federal government has something called impact aid. When a school district like EPISD gets a large concentration of military students, the federal government gives them money to cover some costs.

Q: And as far as getting those bonds for Socorro, what's the obstacle?
I think that if people saw this information, they'd understand how important it is for Socorro to pass a bond. I don't know the details to why Socorro's bond didn't pass, but I think they'll figure it out and go out with another one. Once parents there begin to see the capacity issues, they're going to pass a bond. Sooner would be better than later.

Q: What about housing?
They're expecting 20,000 married or single soldiers to live outside the gate in apartments, rental homes, ownership units. Depending on rank, some soldiers get as little as around $800 a month for basic housing. That doesn't get you a great apartment, especially compared to the privatized housing on Fort Bliss. So the question is, can we build nice housing at the right price outside the gate?

The timing is bad, with the subprime mess, money is harder to get. Permits are going down at the same time the value trend is going up. We're building nicer, bigger, more expensive homes – fewer homes, but more expensive.

That gap in between is where you need to be building. We'll need to start building in there relatively soon or we'll be building in the wrong price range.

Q: What's your role here?
Looking at other things we can do. The city plays a large role in making lots available for development. Fort Bliss officials brought all the Army housing folks down so they could understand what the demand and impact were going to be outside the gate. What are the things the Army can do aside from housing allowances? The Army has something they call lease points, where they can actually do a five-year lease on property for military families.

Q: Do you predict that's going to happen?
They've already done it in other places. The main obstacle here is to show that there's going to be a need for that. It really all depends on whether there's a response from developers in terms of building at the right price. It's not difficult for the Army to do that. They just typically do that when there's a need. If there's no need, there's no reason for them to jump out and give in to a bunch of five-year leases. We're not going to see them jump to something like that until one of the later growth years like 2010.

Q: Why is healthcare an issue when Army families can go to William Beaumont Army Medical Center and have services like Tri-Care? How does that affect the city?
A couple of ways. Obviously if you're military, you're going to get your care at Beaumont or one of the troop medical clinics on post.

The real question is Tri-Care, which is what family members use for care outside the gates. The reimbursement rates aren't that great.

We have an estimated demand for 615 additional doctors and almost 2,300 nurses by 2017. Some doctors don't take Medicare, for example. They do only private insurance.

If you don't recruit more physicians, you may have doctors who don't need to add another patient, especially patients whose reimbursement rates aren't that good.

This is one problem I don't think we have a really good grasp of yet. The team that's working on this has a retired two-star general and used to be in charge of all Army medical care for the entire western half of the United States. It's that level of understanding and expertise that we're going to need to get a better grasp of this. The numbers we have now – the 615 and almost 2,300 – are actually low. Those were done when we expected the new troops were going to be around 20,000 to 21,000. The number is now at about 28,000.

Q: What can you do about Tri-Care rates?
You can't do anything about that. But what other kinds of things can you do to alleviate the healthcare demand? El Paso Community College and the University of Texas at El Paso are graduating a ton of nurses, but they're also at capacity. If you can't get people in your courses into clinical space, then you can't increase capacity.

Q: Without someone in your position, what would happen?
Without my role and without the DoD program, there wouldn't be a growth management plan. They're so expensive and time-intensive that you would have to allocate city staff members to work with a consultant.

The Army understands a lot of regions can't afford that. They help by giving us a whole lot of money to pay for one of these plans to make sure that when the soldiers come here, they don't run into some of these problems.