With the first wave of defense jobs expected to transfer to Maryland this year from military base realignment, officials in Baltimore and the suburbs are gearing up to sell workers in New Jersey and Northern Virginia on making their homes in the state.
Live Baltimore Home Center, the nonprofit group that promotes living in the city, plans to bus defense workers and their families to Baltimore on April 12 for a daylong introduction to urban life on the Patapsco River.
The "Greenlight" tour, as Live Baltimore has dubbed it, will include a community fair, narrated neighborhood bus tours and an afternoon reception at the Top of the World in the World Trade Center.
"This is an opportunity to see neighborhoods, rather than just see the touristy parts of Baltimore," said Anna Custer, executive director of Live Baltimore.
Custer said more than 150 Fort Monmouth employees and their families signed up for the tour after a visit to the New Jersey post last month by Live Baltimore staff to promote the city. A similar foray is planned next week to woo employees of the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is relocating its headquarters to Fort Meade.
Harford County is planning to offer similar bus tours of its communities later in the spring and fall to Fort Monmouth workers, said James C. Richardson, the county's economic development director.
"The landscape has changed significantly," he said, as military brass, after months of controversy over their decision, have publicly recommitted to closing Fort Monmouth and relocating its high-tech defense work to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford.
The relocation, approved in 2005 by the president and Congress as part of a nationwide base realignment, has drawn fire from New Jersey officials and base employees, who contend that closing the 90-year-old Army post and moving its 5,000 employees to Maryland will disrupt support for the war on terror and cost far more than originally estimated. They aired their concerns in December at a House hearing in Washington.
However, Maj. Gen. Dennis L. Via, Monmouth's commander, published a letter in the base newspaper last month, saying that with less than three years to go before the relocation is to be completed, "it's now time to move forward."
Via and about 20 of his command staff visited Aberdeen Proving Ground at the end of last month, and toured Baltimore City and Harford and Baltimore counties, said Karen Emery Holt, manager of the regional base-realignment office coordinating preparations for the expected move.
An advance team of 32 positions has relocated to Aberdeen Proving Ground from Monmouth, but 340 more jobs are expected to move in the current fiscal year, followed by about 600 more in the next year.
About 15,000 mostly civilian military and defense contractor jobs are to be moved to Maryland installations as a result of the nationwide realignment that Congress approved, with the bulk of the growth occurring at Aberdeen and Meade.
But planners have predicted that as many as 45,000 other jobs could move or be created in the state as a result of the economic activity spawned by the base growth.
Planners also have suggested that as many as 25,000 households might move to the state with the base expansions. About 6,500 of those are expected to settle in Harford, near the proving ground, followed by 4,400 in Anne Arundel, home to Fort Meade.
But planners say they also think that Baltimore City could attract 2,500 households of workers, so the city has given Live Baltimore $250,000 to try to make those projections come true.
Custer said she's hopeful of selling urban life to many of the 700 recent college graduates hired as "interns" at Fort Monmouth and at the Defense Information Systems Agency, now based in Arlington, Va. But in addition to young singles and empty nesters, she said she's angling for workers with families by telling them about the options for housing and schooling in the city.
The tour is mean to "dispel the myths" about Baltimore, she said, and "get into what's really available here."
While the city's public school system has struggled with low test scores and other problems, Custer said her group would tell visitors about Baltimore's schools and programs for artistically inclined and high-achieving students, as well as about private school options.
As for the city's violent-crime rate, she pointed out that homicides this year have dropped to a level not seen since 1978.
"We think the city has a lot of opportunities for everybody," Custer said.
tim.wheeler@baltsun.com