About 40 to 45 percent of his guests are soldiers or their family members, he said.

Patel said hotel owners around Fort Lee have already seen a loss in revenue after the installation opened a 1,000-room lodge on the post last year and began demanding lower nightly rates in its contracts with more than a dozen nearby hotels.

“We’re struggling right now, so this will have a significant impact not only on the hotel business, but other businesses as well,” Patel said. “It’s going to kill us.”

In Prince George, the school system has seen its military student population rise from 25 percent to about 33 percent of all students, said School Board Chairman Roger E. Franklin Jr. He said he hopes the projections don’t come true, but the decision is out of the county’s hands.

“If we lost a significant number of students, we’d have no choice but to look at places we could trim our budget back. And with the recession we’ve been going through, there’s not a lot of cutting space,” Franklin said. “The impact is an increase in the student-teacher ratio … one of those things that can have tremendous positive or tremendous negative impact depending on which way it goes.”