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MOUNTAIN HOME -- Merchants perceive a new, zooming business development energy these days on Mountain Home's Air Base Road.
DeMeyer Furniture moved out of downtown Mountain Home and constructed a $1.25 million, 30,000-square-foot store there.
Mountain Home businessman Alan T. Bermensolo built a new storage facility there. Bowman Plumbing built a new store there.
DeMeyer Furniture general manager Raymond DeMeyer said the Air Base Road business corridor is mirrored by a couple of popular Boise retail avenues.
"I would refer to the Air Base Road as kind of the Fairview (Avenue) or Milwaukee (Street) of Mountain Home," DeMeyer said. "It's where the businesses are going to."
Air Base Road is the thoroughfare that travelers follow through town to reach the Mountain Home Air Force Base 10 miles to the south.
DeMeyer said Air Base Road's connection with the base has made it a strategic and popular location for business owners.
"It is the main artery to the base, which is 10 miles down the road," he said. "So, anybody traveling to or from the base, they have to use this road traveling."
And Mountain Home city officials and business people, including Bermensolo, say government assurances in recent years that the Mountain Home Air Force Base will survive federal military base closures is the impetus behind the new, citywide business development drive. The Department of Defense also appears to be backing up its talk with a number of new expansion projects at the base in recent years, officials say.
With its $161.7 million annual payroll, the Mountain Home Air Force Base is the lifeblood of the Mountain Home economy. The base's 4,000-plus employees make it the largest employer in Elmore County.
On Air Base Road, the local economy is doing anything but cooling its jets.
"In my opinion, I would call it a pretty robust economy," Bermensolo said. "I think Mountain Home is pretty healthy right now. One way to gauge that is to look down Air Base Road.
In short, life in an economic vacuum is a vanishing memory in Mountain Home; a desert town 40 miles southeast of Boise.
The business confidence chasm had been created by ominous late 1980s and early 1999s reports that federal funding cutbacks threatened to close the Mountain Home...