For its part, the county is also pleased with Friday's announcement.

"We're pretty excited they didn't touch our other bases," Dugway Proving Ground and the Tooele Army Depot, County Commission chairman Dennis Rockwell said.

Rockwell said county officials have been discussing for years how they would manage the depot's impending closure. Now they will have the military's help.

Commissioner Matt Lawrence said he is unsure how the site can be used after the depot is gone. Some older areas have leftover environmental contamination that will need to be cleaned up, but some land could be used for industrial and maybe even residential development.

Commissioners also expect some facilities may be useful to the nearby Tooele Army Depot, which could potentially use some storage igloos to expand its stockpile of conventional munitions.

Malcolm Walden, BRAC transition coordinator at TAD, said plans to expand into Deseret once it closes have long been in the works. Officials must get permission from the Department of Defense to use the munitions igloos at Deseret.

The county has faced the aftermath of a BRAC round before: In 1993, TAD lost almost 4,500 jobs. Today, the county is growing rapidly.

"When they had the last BRAC closure, we thought Tooele County would just dry up and close down," Rockwell said.

The depot has often been the target of groups unhappy with the storage of so large a chemical weapons cache — initially more than 42 percent of the nation's entire stockpile.

Jason Groenewold, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, said he hopes the depot's inclusion on the list marks the beginning of the end.

"Hopefully this means the incinerator won't be used for other waste-disposal projects and Utahns don't have to worry about other chemical weapons being dumped in Utah," he said.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said Friday he is committed to stopping the flow of additional chemical weapons to the state.

Recently, there were concerns the depot would take in more than 780,000 more chemical weapons — filled with more than 5 million pounds of mustard — to be shipped from Colorado and Kentucky. The Pentagon allayed those fears last month by announcing its plans to build new incinerators on the sites where the weapons are stored. Groenewold said the plans to close the depot seem to solidify that.

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E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com; ldethman@desnews.com