Day care, dancing, even airstrip part of decision
Many workers like what they hear but still can't say 'yes' yet
Sunday, January 15, 2006
ARLINGTON, Va. - Charlise Maxwell wants to know how much day care costs and where she can go dancing.
David Olivares wants to know if there's land in the Grissom High School district to build an airstrip. He's interested in Grissom because his teenage daughter went online and determined that the cutest boys go there.
The needs and wants of 4,715 Department of Defense employees in the Washington, D.C., area whose jobs are scheduled to move to Redstone Arsenal over the next few years are wildly different. There's no one right answer to what the Huntsville area offers.
That's why the decision to follow their jobs or to find new ones when their old ones go away is so difficult. That's why even the people who seem the most excited about starting over somewhere cheaper and easier to live can't say "yes" just yet.
They aren't just moving themselves. They're moving their lives.
How's the nightlife?
Maxwell's question in the Tennessee Valley-organized town hall meeting in Arlington last week amazed the 200-plus people in attendance. The petite 27-year-old said she is a mother of five, but she still likes to go dancing, and she wanted to know if the Huntsville area offers clubs and nightlife.
Dave Walker, a young Huntsville professional who was on the panel to answer such questions, assured her that there are places to dance and hang out with friends. The figures she was quoted for day care are dramatically less than what she's paying in Prince George's County, Md.
Even though her parents live in her neighborhood and even though she enjoys much of what the big city offers, she's leaning toward moving when her job as a facilities analysis agent for the Missile Defense Agency goes south.
"My neighborhood is going downhill, and my children's school has twice as many students in it as it was built to hold," Maxwell said. "I want my kids to have the chance to be kids, and I think they could do that in Alabama."
That's not how she initially felt when she heard the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, or BRAC, wanted to move the Missile Defense Agency to Redstone. Her first reaction: "I don't want to move." But then she started thinking practically.
She doesn't want to lose her job.
With potentially thousands of BRAC-displaced federal employees looking for government jobs in the Washington area, "the job market is going to be tough." Her husband works in maintenance, "so we cannot afford to lose my paycheck."
Maxwell said her mother's opinion means everything. When she first asked her mom, a civil rights lawyer, what she thought about the possibility, "she went a little crazy."
"She went upstairs and said she was going to find information on the Internet to prove to me that I didn't want to move my family to Huntsville," Maxwell said. "When she came back downstairs a little while later, she said the Internet wasn't working.
"The truth was, she didn't find anything bad about Huntsville."
Maxwell, who is black, is married to a white man. She's concerned that her family will be ridiculed because they're mixed, and she's concerned that her husband doesn't want to go.
"He's told me, 'You'll have the MDA community, but I'll have nothing,' " Maxwell said. "So even though the lower cost of living sounds great to me, I just don't know yet if we'll go."
Tired of commute
Olivares, 43, knows he's going somewhere, but he doesn't know where.
For the past four years, he's commuted three hours each week between his home in Lynchburg, Va., and Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md., where he works in the applied physics laboratory for the Missile Defense Agency's air defense systems.
He's ready for the commute to end. His son, Eric, who would've hated to move, is going to college this fall. His daughter, Sarah, who will be a high school junior next school year, is open to moving. His wife, Debbie, is thrilled at the prospect of everyone living under one roof.
The question is, move near Hopkins or move near Redstone? Hopkins is opening a field office in Huntsville's Cummings Research Park in March, and he could work there, or he could continue to work in Maryland.
Whichever it is, he plans to do it by July so Sarah can get acclimated and start a junior year in her new hometown.
He's leaning toward Huntsville, which he said is similar to Lynchburg. He's visited Madison County several times on business, and he likes it.
"I went to kindergarten in Huntsville," Olivares said. "My dad supported the Apollo program, so it's not like it's a foreign place to me.
"I've been away from my family so much the past four years, and I'm ready to make a change. I've promised my wife that we'll do something this summer."
Once they decide on Redstone or Maryland, the family will have to make another decision: Where to live?
Olivares has his own plane, and he'd like to have room to put in a landing strip. Between Grissom's reputation as one of the best high schools in the city and his daughter's belief that the cutest boys attend there, he'd like to be in that district. Huntsvillians he talked with about the possibility said finding that kind of land in the city limits could be tough.
"It's worth looking for," he said. "It'd be great if everyone could have what they want."
© 2006 The Huntsville Times
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