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Sunday, November 22, 2009
Air Base Brings Big Clovis Boom
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
CLOVIS — Four years ago, Cannon Air Force Base was on the chopping block and thousands of jobs were poised to disappear. The governor, on a rescue mission to persuade a federal panel to save the base, predicted that if the base closed as scheduled at the end of 2009, a third of eastern New Mexico's economy "would be devastated." People in Clovis looked at the impending base closure as an economic death sentence.
We were all writing the town's obituary.
But if you drive through Clovis today, you'll see nothing but life.
There's traffic, tons of it.
Big vacant lots, hay or sorghum fields a few years ago, now sprout dozens of brick-facade homes with newly sodded lawns and "SOLD" signs.
Construction workers are crawling around like busy ants building even more of those homes.
And, if you measure the wealth of a community by its Hobby Lobbys, and Hastings and Lowe's and Chili's and Holiday Inns and Red Lobsters, well, Clovis is loaded.
Clovis economic development specialist Gene Hendrick says, "We died, but we went to heaven."
While towns across New Mexico and the nation are suffering from double-digit unemployment and flagging retail sales and it's more common to see foreclosed homes than new ones being built, what happened to pull Clovis, population 43,000, from the brink of disaster?
A little thing called "special ops."
The Air Force base that sits on the western edge of Clovis used to house F-16 fighter squadrons before Pentagon belt-tightening sent the F-16s elsewhere. But instead of closing the base as the Pentagon recommended, the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission gave Cannon a reprieve and the Pentagon replaced the F-16s with the 27th Special Operations Wing.
Special operations is at the core of the fighting future of the United States military — it's all about anti-terrorism and door-to-door combat. For Clovis, it was kind of like someone taking their Oreo cookie away and replacing it with a big banana split.
The F-16s provided about 4,000 military and civilian jobs. The special ops wing already has about 3,000 airmen on the base and another 700 or so civilians employed. The wing expects to add nearly 2,000 more personnel in the next five years.
What that looks like in a local economy is a whole lot of people who need a house and furniture and gas and groceries — and who have somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million in payroll to fund it. But it means Clovis has to hustle to make accommodations for all those people with all that money to spend.
Real estate agent Max Watt has been part of that hustle. There are fewer than 300 homes on the market in Clovis — you see a lot more signs that say SOLD than FOR SALE. But there are a lot of potential buyers who need a house now.
"They're single, younger airmen, mostly, and they want new housing," Watt tells me. "We're building, but now they're sticks. They're at least three months away."
All of this housing need has attracted the attention of developers who were having trouble finding any opportunities to build homes in other markets.
When I meet Roger Schuh, he is holding a fat roll of blueprints for homes in the 82-lot Almond Ranch Estates subdivision he has started building. It's called Almond Ranch because Schuh and his brother, Gary, are almond farmers from California's central valley who have come to Clovis to invest some of their money into a real estate market that is booming instead of crashing.
Chase Gentry, who directs the Clovis Industrial Development Corp., points out that puts Clovis in a position to host a growing, not shrinking, military mission.
When you add in all the additional civilian support jobs that are expected to be needed for the new mission, Clovis is expecting the Cannon population to double.
The Schuh brothers are building homes in the $180,000 range, a few clicks below the average new home price in Clovis. They're expecting an influx of young airmen and airwomen who can afford something in that price range and need a place to live.
"Not expecting," Gary Schuh says. "I'm betting on it."
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
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