Initially, we asked what were the most important fiscal impacts of the DOE sites on the region. Nearly half of the responding towns and counties reported that DOE provides some type of direct payment to them. Those reporting financial support were primarily the host counties who receive payment in lieu of taxes for the land that was taken for the site, or places like the City of Broomfield near Rocky Flats, where DOE provided $56 million to fund a special capital project to replace the water supply.

The $40,000 in-lieu-of-taxes allotment that DOE pays to Butte County, Idaho, for instance, amounts to about 11 cents per acre of land the Idaho Lab occupies in the county. The fiscal official there lamented that the lack of impact fees from DOE limit the county’s revenue base. Even in Los Alamos, the official there referred to the lab as a billion dollar industry that is virtually tax exempt. The fiscal official from Westminster, Colorado, near Rocky Flats, commented that the city does not receive DOE money to pay for local government staff to oversee Rocky Flats activities that affect surrounding land use and water quality. This staff time takes away from work needed to meet the city’s routine operations. The absence of adequate levels of direct payments from DOE to local governments is a pervasive issue that has fueled resentment at the major sites.

Effects on employment levels are the most frequently cited as major impacts. Jobs are the number-one concern among residents living near nuclear weapons facilities. Even though all of these sites have dangerous radioactive materials and the potential for, if not a history of, public health threats, concern over the loss of jobs rated even higher than the concern for site contamination.

Only 15 percent of the respondents said the facility had little or no effect on employment. Nearly half said that employment had dropped precipitously. Others reported employment decreases or a roller coaster of increases and decreases. Because DOE dollars account for a large percentage of local income, reductions in these dollars, as one official put it, may be "good for the U.S. economy but they hurt the local economy."

Employment losses have caused property values to drop near Savannah River, Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Oak Ridge. In fact, loss in property value was the second largest fiscal effect caused by the shrinking of the nuclear weapons complex. The only place to report that a DOE site actually increased property values greatly was Bernalillo County, New Mexico, host county to Sandia Lab. Sandia has experienced the least layoffs, and well-paid scientists and engineers continue to create a demand for high-priced housing. A similar effect occurs at Los Alamos, where high property values make affordable housing for nonlab jobs virtually unavailable.

Compared to employment and property values, fewer officials said that other secondary effects from layoffs—such as impacts on debt, tax rates, school enrollment, and social services—were substantial. But if effects were noted, they were almost always economically bad. A comment from a fiscal official in one of the cities near Hanford summed up the interaction of these effects well:

The picture that emerges is that fluctuating employment levels cause fiscal strains on local governments faced with building homes and schools in the good times and paying for them in the bad times.

COMMUNITY READINESS

A second major concern of communities in the neighborhood of nuclear weapons sites is whether they have adequate regional economic strength or attractiveness to handle impacts of downsizing. The answer in most cases is no. A comment from an official near the Hanford site is typical: "The federal presence this 50 some years has done little to provide any long-term legacy in our community—no industry or no infrastructure that will outlive the site."

Stronger and more diversified economies in the greater Denver, Knoxville, and Albuquerque regions will help Rocky Flats, Oak Ridge, and Sandia, respectively, to bounce back much better from dependence on military facilities. The constraints to growth at Los Alamos are not as much related to lack of infrastructure and amenities as to lack of available space and few connections to Santa Fe. Los Alamos, which is located on a relatively small section of plateau, occupies most of the available land, leaving little physical space to expand or diversify the economy.

The economic legacy of the nuclear weapons sites takes different forms in each of the regions, but a common thread is that while dependence on a large number of high-paying jobs from a single employer for 50 years has supported these economies, it has also stunted long-term growth.

PLANNING FOR TRANSITION

Finally, we turn to the question about what future uses are most suitable to help ease the fiscal and economic impacts on communities near a downsizing or closing DOE facility. Most respondents, think the lands should be retained for industrial or nuclear use. This is probably because community leaders see these uses as the best ways to retain more jobs directly at the site.

Communities around Rocky Flats, however, which were also the only places to prefer complete closure of the site, do not want future nuclear uses. One of the big municipal impacts from Rocky Flats is the threat the nuclear facility poses to drinking water supplies. Removing nuclear and hazardous materials and closing the site therefore are probably in the community’s best interest, both economically and for public health. Moreover, nearby communities, like Boulder, are anxious to designate the site as open space to limit growth and development.

Jobs are too important in the other major site-regions to let go of the sites’ missions entirely. Waste management, parks and reserves, commercial uses, and recreation—in that order—are the preferred uses in those areas. Residential and agricultural uses are not widely preferred for the sites, partly because most of the regions do need additional land for these purposes and partly because leftover contamination renders the land unfit, or at least unappealing, for these uses. Regardless of the future use, however, many communities would like to see lands shift back into private ownership and be put back on the local tax rolls following decommissioning.

Although some efforts are being made, more undoubtedly could be done to alleviate economic stresses in these communities and help them prepare for a lessened DOE presence. And even if DOE chose not to offer more financial support, it could help immeasurably by communicating in a forthright manner about future plans, working directly with local governments, and committing itself to future plans, whatever they may be. Our survey showed that only rarely are local leaders invited to contribute to site future use decisions, though most want to be involved.

WHAT NEXT?

Just as the building of the nuclear weapons complex fueled regional economies across the United States, now the ceasing of weapons production has caused these same regions to feel the sting of job losses and negative ripple effects in the local economy.

Most of the secondary and tertiary impacts of job reductions are hitting hardest in the rural regions least equipped to respond to them. Similar impacts occurred with the restructuring of the defense industry and military downsizing worldwide, where the more remote regions faced a tougher transition than regions close to more urbanized areas.

Each DOE site region will respond differently to site downsizing, and each will face a unique set of issues in managing the community transition. For instance, some rural regions that have relatively shallow and leaky economies—that is, their investment dollars tend to end up outside the region—are less able to produce jobs from investment dollars, so a greater effort and a different type of assistance will be required there than in the more urbanized areas.

Economic assistance programs cannot be monolithic. After 50 years of doing business behind closed doors rather than actively listening to community officials, DOE cannot rely on a one-size-fits-all approach. Such an approach may be suitable for managing technical operations but will not work for site-specific economic development activities that require community involvement. Citizens and local officials at different sites have very different messages to convey, which poses a great challenge to DOE since it has little organizational experience in listening to stakeholders.

DOE should feel obligated to mitigate impacts on communities that have supported its operations over the years. A private firm can shut its doors and leave a community to fend for itself, but most people would agree that as a federal department, DOE should take some action to cushion negative effects of its decisions. There is precedent for this in other regions dominated by federal dollars; military bases and national forests are good examples.