Advocates for Robins get help from Hawkinsville retirees

HAWKINSVILLE -- In a small office here, a couple of retirees are doing their part to save Robins Air Force Base.

Every Tuesday, volunteers Lynn Harper and Nancy Wall show up at a building that is vacant except for the small office they occupy. They constitute a remote outpost of the 21st Century Partnership, which advocates for the base.

They scour the Internet, databases, documents and newspapers for any data that might be needed should a Base Realignment and Closure Commission come calling. The aim is to be able to prove that Robins is the best place for the Department of Defense to do business.

It might seem like tedious work to some people, but Harper and Wall find digging up various tidbits of information about the area interesting and rewarding.

But bottom line, they see the need for it.

"We know the importance of Robins Air Force Base in this area, because without Robins, we might as well all hang it up and go home," Harper said.

Also, they both worked jobs in their careers that involved a lot of data and statistics, so it's something they are used to doing.

Retired Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner, leader of the 21st Century Partnership, calls Harper and Wall "the Hawks," for Hawkinsville. They even sign emails to him that way.

He makes the drive from his office in Warner Robins regularly to visit them. He said they are making an important contribution.

"They are very detail oriented and very dedicated," he said. "I couldn't be more pleased with the work they are doing and the things they are finding."

Their work is actually about to start getting put to use. The partnership has compiled data for Peach County into a presentation. Stenner is planning to share that information with Peach County officials, with other communities to follow.

"Everybody's got something they can do to work on moving the needle," he said. "I'm certainly not going to tell them what they should do. I am just going to show them where we are."

Harper and Wall are both retired federal civilian workers, and both have seen the impact of BRAC in their careers.

They are members of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. After the 21st Century Partnership gave a presentation at one of their meetings earlier this year, they offered to help prepare for the next BRAC.

Stenner put them to work collecting data, including an examination of what the two previous BRACs have considered in deciding whether to close a base. That includes such things as crime rates, high school dropout rates and the availability of medical care.

And there's no way to be sure what a future BRAC might consider, so they basically collect whatever nuggets of information they can find about the Middle Georgia region.

At least one question from a previous BRAC can now be answered more positively for Robins. A previous review panel asked whether there was a public transportation system that served Robins. That was a "no" before but is a "yes" now.

When Harper and Wall first started the work, they drove to the 21st Century Partnership office in Warner Robins. But the partnership's board chairman, Rob Brooks, is president of ComSouth, which owned a vacant building in Hawkinsville that the company renovated but hasn't used. He gave them the office space to save them the drive.

Among trends they have discovered is lack of dentists in rural areas. Pulaski County has only one dentist, and Crawford County has none.

They are anxious to get data on medical care for 2015 to see the impact of the Affordable Care Act.

A perhaps surprising trend they have found is that Houston County, one of the most affluent counties in the area, has more single-parent households than the national average, and that is trending upward.

Meanwhile, rural Pulaski County has a good rating on access to primary medical care providers.

Wall and Harper don't always have easy places to pull up data. Things such as graduation rates do not include private schools, so they contact private schools to get that so they can present the data as well to BRAC.

They spend a lot of time checking each other and making sure the information they get is correct.

"When Gen. Stenner goes to these counties presenting them with data on what they are doing great and no so great to support the base, he's got a credibility to maintain there, and we want to make sure he's got the best data available," Hall said.

This story was originally published October 16, 2015 at 9:32 PM with the headline "Advocates for Robins get help from Hawkinsville retirees ."