Fort Riley garrison staff hosted members of the Junction City Chamber of Commerce Crossroads of Leadership Class April 15. The visit focused on partnerships between Geary County, Junction City and Fort Riley.
A goal of the visit, according to garrison planning documents, was to promote understanding, build and strengthen community relations and reaffirm the region as the best place to live, train, deploy from and come home to in the Army.
For the group, it was about learning what the post does and understanding its relationship to the community.
"Overall, throughout this course," said Melissa Tyson, marketing manager for Junction City's Daily Union newspaper, "it's been great to get out and actually visit the local companies that do business here (in the Geary County and Junction City area). We've been to a lot of companies but Fort Riley is the biggest one in the region so it really helped me to know about the different aspects of what the post does."
Dennis Beson, chief executive officer of the Junction City Chamber of Commerce, said Fort Riley's willingness to work with Junction City is of high importance.
"We value our (Geary County and Junction City) partnership with Fort Riley to the greatest degree and we are appreciative that Fort Riley always has its doors open to us. I was here at the end of (Maj. Gen.) Paul Funk's time here and he was always helpful, and Maj. Gen. (Wayne W.) Grigsby is the same way."
The group received briefings from Tim Livsey, deputy garrison commander of Fort Riley; Clayton Boyer, director of maintenance operations for Corvias Military Housing; Maria Berrios Borges, sales and merchandise manager for the Fort Riley Main Post Exchange, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service; Angela Geary, services business manager for AAFES; and Paul Oltmanns, general manager of Candlewood Suites at Fort Riley, a member of the Intercontinental Hotels Group Army Hotels.
Staff at Corvias Military Housing hosted the students with a working lunch, and discussed the company's focus on community relations. Livsey, provided the class with an overview of Fort Riley and the garrison command, and AAFES and IHG staff provided tours of their facilities and discussed topics of interest including the importance of community relations, vendor and sponsorship opportunities and customer service.
Livsey emphasized the nearly $3.5 billion impact Fort Riley has on the region; and impact that impact includes payroll, supplies, services, contracts, construction, education, and health care that is out-sourced into the community.
But Livsey also assured the group that the post and its leadership can only do so much on their own and needs strong partnerships with surrounding communities.
"Fort Riley has no monopoly on expertise," Livsey said.
Boyer's briefing discussed what Corvias Military Housing provided in the way of services and state-of-the-art housing for Fort Riley Soldiers, but also emphasized the significant contributions to the community through its Corvias Foundation and Adopt-A-Charity efforts that produced scholarships for education and nearly 5,000 volunteer hours from Corvias staff.
"Through the Corvias Foundation we've been able to distribute $730,000 in scholarships to Fort Riley seniors, and $175,000 in grants to Fort Riley spouses," Boyer said.
He also pointed out about a third of the Soldier population lives on post.
"Sixty-six percent of the Soldiers and their families live outside the gates and most of that number lives in Manhattan or Junction City buying goods and services in those communities," Boyer said.
In fact, later, during the tour of the Post Exchange, a group member asked how many military members shop at the PX as opposed to the stores in the community.
"Honestly," Borges said, "a lot people shop off-post. There is more selection. And then, when they get off work, they often prefer to shop closer to home."
Yet, the AAFES system at Fort Riley is a large employer and those workers come from military and non-military sources alike, Borges said.
The community connection was also evident with Candlewood Suites at Fort Riley. Candlewood Suites opened its doors two years ago, Oltmanns said, to concerns that it would take business away from civilian establishments. But the net result was 180 rooms returned to the local economy.
"We offer 109 rooms here," Oltmanns said. "Before this hotel was built there was a total of 289 rooms available across the post for military lodging. Now, it's just the 109. That means we gave 189 rooms back to the community."
Moreover, in cases where Candlewood is full, its staff will reach out to help the customer find lodging in the community.
As the lodging requests for Jill Biden's April 6 visit to Fort Riley ballooned from a handful to about a dozen, Oltmanns said, it was decided that Candlewood at Fort Riley could not accommodate them. Oltmanns found rooms for the group off-post.
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