Elizabeth City and the Unfinished Business of Coast Guard Infrastructure
In 2010, a visit to Coast Guard Base Elizabeth City offered a stark reminder that American maritime security often rests on World War II concrete and patched‑up roads. The base commander, Captain Bennett, described a facility that was at once indispensable to the entire Coast Guard aviation enterprise and structurally fragile, a single point of failure sitting on a crumbling warehouse floor and narrow roads hugging the Pasquotank River.
Fifteen years later, Elizabeth City has gained long‑overdue attention in Coast Guard infrastructure plans, yet the broader story remains one of incremental progress constrained by a massive, service‑wide backlog of shore needs.
The recent decision to invest tens of millions of dollars in a major runway project at Elizabeth City is emblematic of this dynamic.
On the one hand, the new airfield work directly addresses operational bottlenecks and safety concerns identified years ago as the aviation mission expanded.
On the other hand, the service continues to operate from a shore infrastructure portfolio where nearly half of assets are past their designed service life and the total backlog has grown to more than 7 billion dollars.
The base that Bennett likened to a small city has seen selective recapitalization, but it has not yet escaped the structural condition of being “old town USA” in concrete and steel.
In the 2010 interview, Bennett’s first point was that nearly every Coast Guard air rescue at sea could be traced back to Elizabeth City. The base housed the Aviation Logistics Center (ALC), which operates as the “FedEx hub” of the aviation fleet: all major aircraft maintenance, spare‑parts warehousing, and depot‑level upgrades for Coast Guard fixed‑ and rotary‑wing platforms passed through this North Carolina node. That centrality magnified the consequences of aging infrastructure; if Elizabeth City failed, the entire aircraft fleet felt the impact.
The physical condition she described was striking. The base was fundamentally a World War II‑era installation, from its buildings to its roads, adapted to modern workloads without commensurate capital renewal. The warehouse supporting aviation parts sat atop what amounted to an underground river, causing floor subsidence and requiring makeshift “bridging” measures to keep shelves standing and stock accessible. Roads that carried roughly 3,000 people per day, military personnel, civilians, dependents, and visitors, were patched as best as base facilities crews could manage, yet the main roadway along the Pasquotank remained vulnerable to erosion and heavy truck traffic.
Even the human‑support infrastructure reflected that improvisational reality. The gym had evolved from chapel to World War II movie theater to an all‑purpose fitness area, and much of the base’s maintenance and “yellow gear” sat outside in sheds or in the open, exposed to North Carolina’s hurricane climate. Bennett’s concern about hurricane vulnerability was not abstract; she pointed to past storms that damaged buildings and waterfront facilities and required supplemental recovery funds to rebuild seawalls and roofs. The paradox was that the Coast Guard was being asked to modernize its fleet and surge in crises (such as the Gulf oil spill) while its core aviation base remained the least visible and least funded element of modernization.
In the years that followed, the Coast Guard’s leadership began to institutionalize infrastructure as part of the broader acquisition and sustainment picture. One concrete expression of this is the Major Acquisition Systems Infrastructure (MASI) program under the Assistant Commandant for Acquisitions, which exists to ensure that when new platforms arrive, the shore side can support them. Infrastructure is now explicitly framed as part of “transitioning to the fleet,” meaning air stations, logistics centers, and bases like Elizabeth City must be upgraded to handle aircraft such as the HC‑130J, C‑27J, and modernized rotary‑wing fleets.
This conceptual shift matters for a place like Elizabeth City because it sits at the nexus of multiple aviation programs.
Today the ALC supports depot‑level work on HC‑130J/H, HC‑144, C‑27J, MH‑60T, and MH‑65E aircraft, performing complex modifications and life‑extension work that underwrites national readiness. Acquisition and logistics documentation now emphasize the need for sufficient hangar space, specialized shops, engine test facilities, and modern warehousing to sustain these fleets over their extended service lives. The narrative has moved from viewing infrastructure as a passive backdrop to recognizing it as an enabler and sometimes constraint on the Coast Guard’s aviation modernization strategy.
At the same time, congressional and oversight scrutiny began to quantify the consequences of under‑investment. Government Accountability Office reporting, highlighted in 2025, underscored that the Coast Guard’s shore infrastructure backlog had climbed above 7 billion dollars, with hundreds of projects competing for limited funding. Nearly half of all shore assets had exceeded their expected service life, and the service’s leaders acknowledged that annual budget requests historically fell short of internal targets for infrastructure. Against that backdrop, every major project at a site like Elizabeth City represents both an operational gain and a visible test of prioritization.
The clearest post‑2010 development at Elizabeth City is the decision to recapitalize crosswind Runway 1‑19 and its associated taxiways. In 2025, the Coast Guard’s Facilities Design and Construction Center in Norfolk awarded a 32‑million‑dollar design‑build contract to reconstruct Runway 1‑19 and restore Taxiways Kilo and Golf. The existing runway had been closed to flight operations, forcing reliance on the primary Runway 10‑28 and reducing flexibility under certain wind and weather conditions.
The scope of the new project is extensive. The contractor will demolish the existing pavement down to natural subgrade and rebuild the 4,518‑by‑150‑foot runway to modern standards, tying back into existing runways and taxiways. The work includes complete replacement of runway and taxiway lighting systems, edge lights, runway‑end identifier lights, guidance signs, duct banks, and associated electrical infrastructure, plus a new end‑of‑runway turnaround apron at the Runway 1‑19 end. Importantly for operations, the plan is to conduct this work without closing Runway 10‑28, minimizing disruption to the ALC and Air Station Elizabeth City while still delivering a fully functional crosswind runway by 2027.
This investment responds directly to the operational logic Bennett articulated. Elizabeth City is described in Coast Guard releases as “a key Coast Guard installation that coordinates and provides regional mission support” and as the home of both the Air Station and the Aviation Logistics Center that performs depot‑level maintenance for the entire aviation fleet. Restoring redundant runway capacity is more than a local airfield project; it enhances resiliency for national‑level aviation sustainment, especially in contingency conditions where crosswinds, wet surfaces, or emergency operations could overload a single runway.
Beyond the runway, a series of less publicized changes also signal incremental modernization at Elizabeth City. A 2025 presentation from the Shore Infrastructure Logistics Center lists a “Base Elizabeth City Child Development Center” among current projects, indicating that family‑support infrastructure is slowly catching up to the operational significance of the base. For a facility that Bennett once described as a small city she effectively “mayored,” the creation of dedicated, modern childcare capacity is a concrete step toward making the base a more viable long‑term posting for Coast Guard families.
On the technical and digital side, the ALC has continued to expand its physical plant and capabilities. Descriptions of the center now emphasize a complex of 23 buildings, including large production hangars, an engine test cell, an aircraft paint hangar, machine shops, and expansive warehouse space. The ALC also features in contract announcements for IT and logistics support, such as recompeted IT services and joint data logistics and maintenance (JDLM) efforts, all of which underpin more efficient aircraft sustainment and configuration management. These developments suggest that while the 2010 concerns about a single, antiquated warehouse may not yet be fully erased, the aviation‑maintenance footprint has grown more sophisticated, with both physical and information‑technology layers of modernization.
Coast Guard sources describe specialized depot-level maintenance on rotary-wing aircraft at the Aviation Logistics Center (ALC) in Elizabeth City on roughly a four‑year programmed cycle, a point that appears in public communications and social media from the service. Official acquisition releases on the MH‑60T service life extension program (SLEP) emphasize that all SLEP work is done at ALC and that ALC’s recurring deep maintenance (about every four years) is what yields 12,000–20,000 hours of remaining service life on post‑SLEP airframes.
Despite these gains, Elizabeth City’s story can only be fully understood against the backdrop of service‑wide infrastructure shortfalls. The GAO’s 2025 reporting portrays a system where years of deferred maintenance and under‑funded recapitalization have produced a backlog that more than doubled between 2019 and 2025. Much of the annual shore‑infrastructure funding is consumed by urgent corrective maintenance, leaving little room for proactive projects beyond the most critical operational priorities. That context explains why a project as central as Runway 1‑19 had to wait until the runway was closed to all operations before receiving full funding and contractual attention.
The GAO has repeatedly recommended that the Coast Guard adopt more predictive models for infrastructure management, align investments more transparently with mission priorities, and provide Congress with clearer budget justifications for shore needs. Progress on these recommendations has been uneven, and several key reforms remain open, meaning that installations like Elizabeth City still compete in an environment where long‑term cost avoidance can lose out to near‑term crisis response. The result is a pattern where major investments arrive, but often later than planners would wish and in narrower slices than a comprehensive modernization agenda would dictate.
This structural reality likely means that some of the specific 2010 concerns, outdoor equipment exposure, legacy building conditions, and the full reconstruction of internal roads, are being addressed in phases rather than through a single, base‑wide overhaul. Available public documentation emphasizes the runway and taxiways, family‑support facilities, and aircraft‑maintenance capabilities far more than it does roads, utilities, or wholesale replacement of World War II‑vintage buildings. The base has clearly advanced, but it has not escaped the larger pattern of incremental shore‑infrastructure modernization under fiscal constraint.
Viewed longitudinally, Elizabeth City offers a useful case study in how the Coast Guard’s modernization narrative has evolved while some core challenges persist. In 2010, Bennett’s comments underscored the hidden nature of shore infrastructure: the public saw rescues at sea, not patched roads and failing warehouse floors. The base’s critical role in aviation sustainment was real, but the infrastructure underpinning that mission was largely absent from strategic discussions of recapitalization.
By 2025, the same base is explicitly recognized in official communications as a key installation for regional mission support, aviation sustainment, and fleet readiness, with a 32‑million‑dollar runway project and an expanded ALC footprint to match. Infrastructure has moved from the background of modernization rhetoric to a more central place in the acquisition and logistics conversation, aided by the formation of programs such as MASI and by external pressure from GAO and Congress.
Yet the persistence of a multibillion‑dollar backlog and the need for GAO to repeat recommendations on infrastructure management show how far the service still has to go to fully secure its shore base.
The through‑line to today is clear.
The concerns that Bennett raised about single points of failure, hurricane vulnerability, and the invisibility of shore infrastructure have not been disproven by subsequent developments; they have been validated by events and only partially mitigated by targeted projects.
The recapitalization of Runway 1‑19 is a meaningful and overdue response to those concerns, as is the gradual build‑out of more capable aviation‑maintenance and family‑support facilities.
But the larger story remains one of a Coast Guard trying to sustain 21st‑century missions from 20th‑century concrete, fighting a structural backlog one project at a time.
The Elizabeth City Case: Always Ready but Persistently Underfunded