Afghan evacuee footprint at US military base: Trash, food shortages, and no hotel rooms

Is the federal government comparable to a tenant trashing a bed-and-breakfast on the way out?

After five months, the final Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy, an Army base in Monroe County, Wisconsin, are leaving to start new lives throughout the United States. Residents seek a return to normal after the Biden administration housed 12,600 refugees at the base and brought in 1,500 government workers to care for them — almost one-quarter of the entire county’s population.

This resulted in large amounts of trash, empty store shelves, restaurants without food, and few spare beds in hospitals and hotels. The costs borne by the county equal at least $1 million, officials said.

“We are more than ready — ready to have our motel rooms back, our hospitals back, and our doctors and dentists,” said Wally Habhegger, vice chairman of the Monroe County Board of Supervisors. “Literally what they did is drop an entire city on us. And they expected us to absorb the infrastructure.”

Monroe County supports the base and its service members. What residents didn’t like is the way the government dropped the refugees there without discussing the plan with local officials or even the local congressman, Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican.

AFGHANS AT WISCONSIN ARMY BASE LACK VETTING BUT CAN LEAVE AT ANY TIME

“We heard just like the rest of the world heard — on the news,” Habhegger said. “So the county sheriff talked to a military police official and was told, ‘They will have zero impact on you. You won’t even know they are there.’”

Yet some 78 pregnant Afghan women gave birth at the installation, and the military’s normal supplier ran short of needed supplies. Workers from the base picked local grocery stores and Walmarts clean of baby food and diapers, forcing residents to drive 30 miles to make purchases, said Monroe County Administrator Tina Osterberg.

“They were going to the local retailers to purchase those items, so they weren’t available for the local citizens,” she said.

And those babies were born in the local hospitals. Other evacuees apparently needed medical aid as well because there were no hospital beds for several months. Doctors and dentists were also completely booked with appointments from the base, Habhegger said.

And the food problem extended beyond babies.

“I talked to food suppliers. It clearly had an impact on their businesses,” Tiffany said. “One of the major food suppliers up there said to restaurant owners, ‘We have a federal government contract to take care of and can’t supply you for a while.’ They were scrambling. And this also included the schools.”

Another problem was the 1,500 federal workers arriving from across the country who did not stay at the base but instead used all the available low-cost hotel rooms in the two cities around the base. This meant that anyone with out-of-town family members would need to stay 40 miles away to get a reasonably priced hotel room.

“For Thanksgiving weekend, the best price was $250 a night for a motel room because all the lower-cost rooms were booked up with government employees,” Habhegger said. “The president of the Wisconsin County Association had to stay in another county because there were no rooms. He was coming here to meet with us about the Afghans.”

While the hotel stays were good business for merchants, each room is charged city, county, and state taxes. The federal government only pays a portion of those levies, leaving the county without hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, country officials said.

Still, a federal worker pointed out that government employees made many other local purchases during their stay, including at restaurants, fast-food establishments, and retail stores, which increased revenue for the community.

All those extra people in Monroe County also produced a significant amount of trash, especially Styrofoam food containers. The county must now expand its landfill after receiving two years’ worth of trash over the course of several months. It will cost up to $500,000, Osterberg said.

A Fort McCoy spokesperson responded by saying the base has a contract to haul away its trash but is currently looking to take its refuse elsewhere.

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Tiffany said the Biden administration needs to pay Monroe County what it is owed for hosting the evacuees.

“With little time to prepare and fewer details of what to expect, the good people of Wisconsin shared their time and resources with the Afghans. Now, it is the Biden administration’s turn to provide funding to make the surrounding communities of Fort McCoy whole,” Tiffany said.