LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock Air Force Base has received $23.6 million to repair buildings damaged in the April 25 tornado that sliced a path through the base in Jacksonville damaging homes, planes and facilities.
The tornado caused $83 million in damage to the base, not including the 20 homes destroyed and more than 200 seriously damaged. Housing at the base is owned and managed by Hunt-Pinnacle properties. The company must fund its own repairs and rebuild using insurance money and other private sources.
The $23.6 million is for repairs to several large buildings, hangars and the Fire Department. Not everything of the base is being rebuilt. But the money helped leverage additional funds for other projects on base. The destruction of some buildings allowed base leaders to accelerate long range plans to move and upgrade some facilities all in one sweep.
“We wanted to take advantage of all the funding options out there,” said Lt. Col. Lance Clark, commander of the 19th Civil Engineering Squadron on base. “And because of that we were able to accelerate our long-term plans five to 10 years.”
Only two tornado-repair projects were not funded: the skate park and the tree replanting project. The base lost a lot of old-growth trees in the storm, most of which were pulled out of the ground by the roots. The skate park is slowly being rebuilt through volunteer efforts.
“For as many trees as we lost, we still have tremendous acreage on base,” Clark said.
The storm mangled the doors on the Fire Department building, tore the roofs off two airplane hangars, left one building little more than a pile of bricks and damaged several other flight-line buildings. The Fire Department worked out of a facility with doorless bays until last week when the huge garage doors of the department’s building were replaced.
Another building, which houses the entomology unit, is still used day to day. But the April tornado weakened it structurally, so airmen can’t work in the building in bad weather because of safety concerns. The base received $1.5 million to replace that building.
The new funding comes at a time when military construction budgets are tighter than ever before. Little Rock Air Force Base ranked third across all bases in the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command in construction funding over the past fiscal year. And most of that is due to tornado-recovery funds.
About $7.8 million has been spent on local contracts for construction work and damage-assessment and design work.
Clark and his team have worked hard to identify available operation and maintenance funding streams as well as military-construction dollars to incorporate future construction and development plans into the tornado rebuild.
“By taking the time to builda long-term plan, you’re ready to leverage funding that comes available,” Clark said. “We are trying to not just bring back what we had, but upgrade to current and future needs.”
That means some buildings will be rebuilt smaller than they were because the extra space was not needed in recent years. And some facilities will be moved, with construction dollars put into renovating existing buildings for use. Many facilities were planned for consolidation in the long-term plan, where smaller buildings or combineduse buildings would meet the need and be more efficient.
“New for the sake of new is not the right thing to do,” Col. Mike Minihan, the base commander, said.
Minihan calls the team that builds the base’s future plan and funding requests his “Fab Four” - the Comptroller Squadron, Civil Engineer Squadron, Contracting Squadron and the judge advocate general, who is his military lawyer.
Typically, the end of the fiscal year is a time when the Department of Defense is balancing books and thereby finding projects that need money that was left unspent in the year’s budget. Those funding opportunities open up for bases that can show they have projects ready for bid that need the money. That is where Little Rock’s 15-year plan paid off more than usual this year.
The base received $41 million in construction funding for all of fiscal year 2011. Those funds are being leveraged with tornado recovery funds to help rebuild the base. Sewer lines needed upgrading, and several buildings not identified as tornado-damaged needed new roofs.
“We didn’t have to think up new stuff,” Minihan said. “We already had the plan and opportunity there.”
Housing repairs are going much slower, however. Blue tarps still cover leaky roofs as Pinnacle-Hunt works through its own funding issues concerns. Since base housing privatized several years ago, theprogress of those repairs is out of Minihan’s and the Air Force’s hands. Still, Minihan is lobbying for rapid recovery as much as he can.
“We are committed to have all repairs done by the anniversary of the tornado, on April, 25, 2012, and have new construction begin on the 20 houses destroyed,” Minihan said. “We’re looking forward to erasing the tornado’s work on the base.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/26/2011