City, Workforce Solutions presents BRAC electronic Town Hall

The City of San Antonio, Workforce Solutions Alamo and other San Antonio BRAC partners are hosted an electronic town hall meeting today that will air on KLRN between mid-November and the end of the year.

The KLRN electronic town hall gave San Antonio BRAC participants the opportunity to tell their respective stories about BRAC progress. In addition, elected officials, neighborhood representatives and business stakeholders had an opportunity to ask project leaders about BRAC construction progress, jobs prospects and economic development opportunities.

"We are about two years away from the SA BRAC project implementation," said James Henderson, Ft. Sam Houston Community Development Office interim manager. "We are at the height of construction at Ft. Sam Houston and the City is going to be opening a community office near the base in the near future to take advantage of the growth in that area. The next 24 months will be an exciting period for San Antonio," he added.

The Military Transformation Taskforce is keeping the community informed about BRAC construction work, job opportunities and economic development possibilities due to the military’s relocation of its medical training mission to San Antonio. The KLRN town hall is just one way to get the interested stakeholders informed.

The military is currently in the process of relocating its medical training mission from locations around the country to San Antonio. Approximately 10,000 families are expected to move to San Antonio, mostly in 2010 and 2011, as part of the medical training reorganization.

More than $3 billion is being invested in construction, mostly at Ft. Sam Houston, to accommodate these major facility and operations transfers. During construction, the economic benefit to San Antonio is expected to be more than $5 billion.

Once the massive BRAC construction process concludes in a couple of years, San Antonio's local bases will train and graduate more than 150,000 students each year. That will mean an economic boost to San Antonio’s financial bottom line from the Department of Defense will be approximately $15 billion annually.

The military is also reorganizing San Antonio’s military bases. At the conclusion of this process known as "joint basing," San Antonio will have the largest base operation within the Department of Defense with a workforce of more than 77,000 people.

The KLRN Town Hall Panel included:
- James Henderson, Deputy Director, Office of Military Affairs
- Major General Erv Lessel, Director, San Antonio Joint Program Office
- Brigadier General Leonard "Len" Patrick, Commander of the 502nd ABW at Ft. Sam Houston
- Scott Gray, MTTF Economic Development Committee Chair
- Chakib Chehadi, Workforce Solutions Alamo Executive Director
- Colonel David Bitterman, Deputy Chief of Staff, Brooke Army Medical Center

For more information, visit www.embracebrac.org.