BRAC to be a windfall for this entire region, and Cecil County Chamber

Yeserday I went to the Cecil County Chamber lunch meeting in Rising Sun.
The speaker Clark Turner of Clark Turner Signature Homes did an
excellent presentation about BRAC and the impact to Cecil County.
HUGE impact!

This lunch was a great event and the Chamber is a tremendous resource which begs to be tapped! There were about 100 people there and they were all friendly and want to do business. Went around the room before lunch, each person stood up and introduced themselves and had 30 seconds to plug their business. Engineers, bankers, consultants, educators, you name it. A good mix of businesses.

Clark Turner relayed some staggering BRAC statistics. Aberdeen
Proving Ground will see 27,000 new jobs of which 23,000 are coming
between now and 2012!. All these jobs are high tech, the AVERAGE
salary at the APG will be around $86,000! There is or will be 3 or
4 million square feet of offices, which is second only to the
Pentagon! Of all the 55,000 BRAC people which will be moving to the
area, 85% will be home buyers (to relate the 55,000, there's about
80,000 that live within the city limits of Wilmington). He thinks 75%
of these people will want to live in Cecil County – why? Because
they will be closer in the middle to family and friends back in Fort
Monmouth – that same logic will help bring buyers to Delaware.
Clark indicated a demand of 12,000 lots are needed to
satisfy all these BRAC buyers. In Harford and Cecil County there are
only 3,000 approved lots in inventory so the 9,000 lot shortfall will
have to be absorbed in surrounding areas and new projects to enter
the pipeline – including Delaware and Pennsylvania! He mentioned that APG has spent a huge amount of money to upgrade their infrastructure and roads on the
base. However the State of Maryland has not kept up! So not only will there be initial congestion, but the opportunity will be there for municipal and state public works projects for roads, sewer, etc. He further mentioned that Cecil County is flat in the middle of a technology corridor – Delaware is chemical capital of the
world, New Jersey is pharmaceutical capital, APG and Fort Mead and
some other is the military capital, northern Virginia is the communications capital…

Now Clark's information was well researched and documented. But even if you discounted half of these numbers, theres still tremendous business and economic opportunities. Talk about the catbird seat!