Businesses that depend on fort brace for change BY GLORIA STRAVELLI Staff Writer GLORIA STRAVELLI Reliable Cleaners and Tailoring, Broadway, WestLong Branch, is one of the many local businesses facing a dramatic drop-off in revenues if Fort Monmouth is closed. Evelyn Malick has operated Reliable Cleaners and Tailoring on Broadway in West Long Branch for more than 35 years. If the federal government goes ahead and closes Fort Monmouth as per the recommendation of its Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), it will cut her dry-cleaning and laundry business by 50 percent. “Half of my business is with Fort Monmouth, not just military personnel, but the uniforms for the prep school and civilian employees, too,” she said last week. “The workers at the fort deal with me, too, because I deliver to the fort. “It’s going to affect everybody — businesses and the real estate market. A lot of families will be forced to move to keep their government jobs,” she said. One of those is her son-in-law, who is seven years away from retirement. “He’ll have to move to keep his retirement,” she said. Fort Monmouth is where Leonard Penta started out as a barber when he first came to America. “I worked in Fort Monmouth for 13 years when I first came to the [United States] from Italy,” Penta said with a heavy accent. Penta has snipped and trimmed the coifs of thousands of military and civilian personnel who worked at the fort during the 30 years he has operated the Village Barbershop in Oceanport. He was livid last week as he spoke animatedly about the BRAC recommendation and had harsh words for the administration’s priorities. “I do a lot of business with the soldiers and workers at the fort. Half of my business is with the fort. “Sure I’m angry. I don’t want to see it close. It’s a shame; everyone’s mad. It’s going to hurt everybody, all over the county,” Penta said. “They’ve been saying they’re going to close it for 40 years; now they’re going to do it. We give money all over the world, and we can’t support Fort Monmouth?” “It’s going to be a problem,” admitted Al Patel, proprietor of Luigi’s Pizza on Oceanport Avenue in Little Silver. “We do a lot of lunch business with the fort. It will have a big impact on our lunch business.” Patel said the fort accounts for half of the pizzeria’s lunch business. Things changed only slightly after 9/11, he said. With heightened security, deliveries are now made to the gate. But business continued to be good. “We sometimes deliver 15-20 pies when there’s a party or something special going on,” Patel said. “I hope something else comes in,” he added. “We’re going to be hurt for sure.” In fact, according to economic impact statistics compiled by the Save Our Fort committee, Fort Monmouth generates $600 million worth of revenues for businesses like Malick’s, Penta’s and Patel’s in the surrounding communities. “There’s certainly going to be a domino effect on all the businesses in the area,” said Bea Duffy, director of the county’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism. “It’s going to hit the small businesses very, very hard. I feel really bad for them. We know what happened to other towns where bases closed — they’re like ghost towns. “It’s certainly an economic boondoggle for the county,” Duffy continued. “We’ve had a very healthy economy. The impact on the county, I would say, will be in the multimillions in retail sales. Needless to say, we’re going to fight our darnedest.” “From a tourism perspective a lot of businesses will be affected,” said Jeanne DeYoung, tourism representative with the office. “When people come to visit families at the fort, they are tourists. They stay at local hotels, eat at restaurants, go to the mall, the track and the beach and they sometimes bring their families,” DeYoung said. “Tourism is far-reaching, and the effect that the closing of the fort is going to have is far-reaching. This will definitely affect all aspects of economics in Monmouth County, and it is compounded by what happened at AT&T and Lucent.”