Community Government

City considers joining organization to support its military families

Whether they have a family member who retired from the military or one who is active duty or a reservist, more than 40 percent of Gig Harbor’s families have some association with the military. It’s no surprise: recent numbers show that the defense sector accounts for more than 250,000 jobs in the state and generates about 4% of Washington’s gross product output, surpassing tourism, agriculture and forestry.

That’s why Gig Harbor is considering joining South Sound Military and Communities Partnerships, an organization that builds relationships between Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma and local jurisdictions.

Region is a military hub

The region saw an influx of service members after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the organization’s program manager, Maria Tobin, told the Gig Harbor City Council at its study session on Feb. 26.

During that time, the number of people at the base alone doubled in size, Tobin said. More people also meant more stress on nearly every aspect of life in the South Sound region, including in education, housing, health care, social services and land use. South Sound Military and Communities Partnerships formed in 2011 to address these issues.

The organization — which partners with cities, counties and tribes, as well as nonprofits and corporations — works with the U.S. Department of Defense. The organization’s partners can receive money from the department’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation.

The military does not directly have access to this money, Tobin said. It is intended for “communities that have assets that directly support the military mission.”

Housing a major issue

The organization focuses on the intersection of civilian and military communities. About 70% of JBLM personnel live outside the base’s fence line, she said, and the cost of living in the area can come with sticker shock.

“The cost of living is really expensive here, especially if you move from the southeast of the United States where a large pool of our Army recruits come from,” Tobin said. “They get here, they have one vehicle, the high cost of living, the housing challenges that are here — so we can do a better job of supporting them. So we focus on these nexus points. That includes business development, child care, education, health care, housing, land use, social services, and transportation.”

The organization also advocates for military families and their needs. Tobin said three studies they asked the Department of Defense to fund returned important results for Joint Base Lewis-McChord families.

One found that the base needs more than 200 new houses. Those results supported the organization’s advocacy to expand on-base housing, Tobin said.

These kinds of results are particularly important in light of the current housing crisis in the wider community, she continued. A single military member or a married military member with one kid might be OK, but it becomes exponentially harder to find affordable housing for families with two or more children.

“What this is causing for our military members is they’re having to live further and further away from the installation. Often in Thurston County, because this is where they can afford to live. Some of them live over an hour away from the installation just to be able to have affordable housing,” Tobin told council members. “This obviously presents significant challenges, especially when you have that family … with one car.”

Military spouses

Another study found that military spouses faced significant employment barriers, including expensive licensing and credentialing transfers, following a move from another state.

The third, called the Military Installation Resiliency Review, looked at 7,500 critical assets within a 15-mile radius of the base’s fence line. It ranked those assets based on the likelihood of an environmental catastrophe and evaluated the impacts an environmental catastrophe would have on the region.

“And out of that resiliency review, we got nine recommendations for implementation out of our Resiliency Action Plan,” Tobin said. Those infrastructure recommendations included investments in defense community infrastructure and advanced priorities for the I-5 corridor and Nisqually Delta restoration.

A slide from the presentation to the Gig Harbor City Council.

Tobin said that much of the organization’s work is focused on the Nisqually Bridge on I-5, just south of the base.

“The reason that we’re focusing on that has to do with prior [U.S. Geological Survey] hydrological studies that have basically told us your next big prolific rainfall that used to happen once every 100 years is now happening every 17 years, due to climate change and an effect called coastal squeeze,” she explained. “So, what we see out of that is that when we have our next prolific rainfall, when we have flooding, we expect the Nisqually Delta to flood I-5 in four separate locations.”

She pointed to the disastrous DuPont train derailment of 2017 that killed three people and injured 65, including people on the roadway, and took out I-5 for more than a week: “We anticipate a flood like this to take out I-5 for more than two weeks. Now that’s particularly important to [our organization] because one-third of our military population lives south of [the base]. This would affect how our service numbers get to work.”

Child care

She also said that access to child care is of particular concern for military families where the military spouse is female.

“And that’s simply because 91% of military families have a female military spouse at home and if the wife’s not happy, life is not happy. If she can’t work — if our military spouses can’t work, they’re not able to provide a good quality of life for their families here,” Tobin said. “It makes them think about, ‘Should I get out of the military or should I ever think about joining the military?’ Quality of life is hugely important for our military families, so we work to expand child care in the South Sound.”

Though she didn’t touch on it in-depth, Tobin mentioned that the organization also focuses on behavioral health. Military family members — especially children — often suffer from complex personal and emotional challenges, like deployments and sudden household moves, that can lead to behavioral health problems. These problems can manifest differently in children than in adults. It can look like anxiety, trouble keeping up in school, and withdrawing from friends.

“There’s a lot of military kiddos that are in the Peninsula School District,” Mayor Mary Barber remarked during council discussion. “I’ve also been talking with the superintendent about that, and how we as a city can play a part in supporting our military kiddos. It’s really difficult. If you have a parent that’s gone, helping those kiddos through that, helping spouses in our community that are here independently is another important issue.”

Barber said that she would like Shealynn Smiley, the city’s Housing, Health, and Human Services program manager, to sit in on the South Sound Military and Communities Partnerships’ behavioral health work groups, “so that we are in on what that is and part of the solution for the community.”