With a loss in approximately 2300 military personnel on Fort Riley, the $10.5 billion Flint Hills region economy is in the midst of losses of about six percent in the overall economy.

Charlie Perham, Project Manager, said that the expected impact garnered enough concern to require an impact analysis.

“The Flint Hills Regional Council was prudent enough to seek an OEA (Office of Economic Adjustment) Grant, and they used that grant money to conduct this analysis,” said Perham.

The findings were startling – in a $10.5 billion Flint Hills economy, the military accounts for about half of that; this means that any additional losses in troops to Fort Riley could have very significant impacts on the region.

“Fort Riley is an operational base, so they have a lot more soldiers but a lot less research and development dollars, so at maneuver bases like this it is a direct correlation between when you lose soldiers, you’re losing impact to the economy,” said Perham.

The study covered the Flint Hills region, which covers seven counties, but Perham’s team only researched and studied the five with the most military impact – Geary, Riley, Clay, Pottawatomie, and Dickinson.

Perham said that the Flint Hills strength is also a major weakness.

“With such a high employment rate in the area, the general trend would be that…we’re going to have to incentivize that person to come work for us, so that means a little bit more pay, or benefits or things like that….when communities around the country see high employment rates, the trailing indicator is that wages start to go up,” said Perham.

But the opposite is happening here – Perham and his Deputy Project Manager Matt Schwab agreed that many of the business owners in the Flint Hills communities were unwilling to increase wages or benefits – citing it was “how they’ve always been”.

But, Perham said that in order to counteract any future (which none have been indicated) reductions at Fort Riley, the communities must work together to keep veterans and retirees in the region.

“As the fiscal pressure at the national level and the state level increases, meaning there’s less money to try to do the same amount of things or more things, what that means is – each individual community is going to have less resources,” said Perham adding that the large number of small, rural communities in the Flint Hills can not stand on their own economically.  “What is regionalism at it’s most basic level – it’s teamwork; it’s working together and pooling your resources for a common goal. The common goal here is to grow the economy; so you grow the economy by recognizing what are the most important factors and now you have a third party analysis that says the defense industry here is half of the economy – so that’s the elephant in the room, so you all are going to work together to try to protect that and then you all continue to work together to really grow everything around that.”

Perham adds that the common interest, or investment, that is Fort Riley should bring all of the Flint Hills communities together; but in his team’s research the two largest communities on either side of the military base seemed to want to do anything but.

Allen Dinkel, Junction City Manager said he’s willing to extend olive branches to everyone in the region.

“I think regionalism is important because we survive together as a group…I think every community can’t do everything, one community can maybe do some things a little bit…I think we need to embrace that a little bit to keep people in the whole area,” said Dinkel.

One interesting thing to note is there are approximately 16,000 veterans in the Flint Hills region and only 3600 retirees.

The Matrix Design Group team agreed the number of retirees was small  and somewhat surprising; even more surprising perhaps is where the majority of retirees choose to live.

Most of the 3600 retirees in the area live in Dickinson county – by far. Riley county was second and Geary third of the five counties studied.

What does this say about the Geary county which houses Fort Riley.

“I wouldn’t call living in Dickinson county leaving the area, from the county line to Chapman is only a few miles [but] that speaks on how we need to handle maybe some of our political business from encouraging people to live in the county, be it zoning, be it fees…and to build housing, how do we push that across;and I think that’s something we’ll need to work on in marketing,” said Dinkel.

If nothing more than informing the community of the presence and impact that Fort Riley has in the region, the Matrix Design Group’s presentation was detailed and lengthy.

There are no current projections for additional personnel reductions, but the figures showing the possibilities were staggering.

The Matrix Design Group’s presentation in it’s entirety will be available next week on https://flinthillsciar.com/. Some of the information is available today on the site, the final findings will be published with complete data accessible to the public on the above website within a month.