JFCOM's Possible Closure - The Risk of Putting All One's Eggs in One Basket

For far too many years the city leaders in the Hampton Roads area have placed all of their economic eggs in one basket. Virginia Beach has chosen to focus on tourism, yet still offers no really top of the line hotels and resorts with the result that big spending tourists go to other destinations. Worse yet, the resort area is run like a police state where only certain "family friendly" businesses are welcome. Top of the line clubs - especially the horrors, gay clubs - are nonexistent and parking has become so difficult/expensive that many locals (gay and straight) simply avoid the resort area entirely. Why go where one is not wanted. The rest of the cities have focused far too much on courting the military and military contractors and the result is that with the proposed closure of the military's Joint Forces Command ("JFCOM"), some of this short sightedness may be coming home to roost. Sadly, most of the leadership of region's cities do little to embrace diversity - although Hampton may have started to crack that mold through its meeting with HRBOR - and a similar closed mindedness is evident at the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce whose leadership is made up of the good old boy types who strike me as believing that blacks, women and gays all need to know their place. A Virginian Pilot article looked at this issue and the likelihood that JFCOM's high tech jobs could be headed to Florida. Here are some highlights:
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Hampton Roads leaders trying to save the Joint Forces Command from extinction are looking nervously to the south. Florida, already in the running to snag one of the Navy's Norfolk-based aircraft carriers, may also turn out to be a beneficiary of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' plan to close the Norfolk-based military command known as JFCOM.
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[P]erhaps the most vulnerable piece of JFCOM is the command's modeling and simulation functions. Those high-tech operations, used for training, experimentation and development of new warfighting concepts, have been the catalyst for a booming cluster of related businesses near JFCOM's operations center in northern Suffolk.
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The nightmare scenario for local leaders is that those programs will be dismantled and consolidated in Orlando, Fla., which has an older, more deeply rooted and much larger concentration of modeling and simulation operations.
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James Koch, an economics professor and former president of ODU, said . . . . Even without JFCOM, the Hampton Roads economy will remain heavily dependent on military spending - dangerously so, in Koch's view. Federal spending on military installations now tops $10 billion a year in Hampton Roads, more than in any other metro area in the country. The direct and indirect effects of military spending account for nearly half of the region's economy, ODU economists estimate, up from one-third a decade ago.
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The trend holds lessons for local leaders, Koch said."I am a great supporter of the Department of Defense, but we cannot depend upon the DOD increasing its expenditures every year, or even keeping them at the same level. "The lesson is that we need to really work on diversifying our economy."
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Diversifying the economy in an area where social and cultural backwardness are still too prevalent and where arriving travelers at Norfolk International Airport are greeted with a huge display of Pat Robertson and Regent University will not be easy. The burden rests, however, not just on local leaders but also on the governmental leadership in Richmond which currently is sending a strong message that diversity and tolerance are in short supply - especially in the governor's and attorney general's offices.