Supporters Await Word on the Fate of Southland Bases

As they awaited release of today’s Department of Defense closure list, supporters of El Segundo’s high-tech Los Angeles Air Force Base were hopeful that the facility would remain open.

“Right now, I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Redondo Beach City Councilman John Parsons, co-chairman of the Los Angeles Air Force Base Regional Alliance.

Parsons and alliance members have been working hard to retain the air base, which employs 4,500 military and civilians and pumps an estimated $8 billion into the local economy.

Parsons said he has spent the last few weeks trying to glean information about the base’s fate from “the rumor mill and the winks and nods you get from various sources.”

In the four previous rounds of base closings, even generals would sometimes talk as long as their remarks were off the record, he said. The current round of closures and consolidations is much more hush-hush, Parsons said, and potential sources aren’t talking.

Since the Pentagon started closing military bases in 1988, California has taken the biggest hit, losing 29 installations and 93,000 jobs.

Advocates have been fighting for California’s remaining 30 major bases and dozens of smaller military installations with the help of the state Office of Military and Aerospace Support, the bipartisan California Council on Base Support and Retention, and community alliances, many comprising base retirees.

Parsons and other champions of the Los Angeles Air Force Base have put almost $1 million into their effort. But they have a lot to overcome, in part because the facility doesn’t resemble any other Air Force base.

The home of the Space and Missile Systems Center, the facility looks like an office complex. There are no hangars and the closest planes are at Los Angeles International Airport.

“We don’t have runways,” said alliance co-chairman Joe Aro, executive director of the South Bay Economic Development Partnership. “We say our runways are vertical because we deal with space.”

But for all its unconventional appearance, the base is essential to the country’s defense, supporters say. Administering more than $60 billion in defense contracts annually, the facility develops and acquires space-based radar and communications systems essential for national security and military use, including satellites, launch vehicles and ground systems. It also manages intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“If we lose it, I’ll really cry,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

According to a corporation study, the base supports 50,000 high-wage jobs in Los Angeles County that generate $2.45 billion. Statewide, the base supports an additional 62,000 high-wage jobs.

If the base closed or left the state, California would lose $312 million annually in tax dollars, Los Angeles County would lose almost $8 million, and Southland cities would see $5.5 million vanish from their tax rolls, Kyser said.

Ventura County

Naval Base Ventura County, which includes the Seabee base at Port Hueneme and the Naval Air Weapons Center at Point Mugu, supports 18,000 jobs and accounts for $2 billion in local revenue.

“We’re going to have a party or we’re going to have a wake,” said Tom Nielsen, spokesman for a regional task force that has spent months stressing the base’s strategic importance.

Inland Empire

In Riverside County, March Air Reserve Base, home to 9,100 reservists and National Guard personnel, serves as a recruiting and training center for the Army, Navy and Marines. The base generates about $423 million a year for the local economy.

Officials have lobbied to make the base home to one of 10 possible federal homeland security centers.

“There is some anxiety,” said retired Col. Phil Rizzo, who served as base commander at March until 1992. “Not knowing what is going to happen certainly gets people’s juices moving.”

Other military installations in Riverside and San Bernardino counties include Barstow Marine Corps Logistics Base, Ft. Irwin Army National Training Center, Marine Corps Twentynine Palms Air Ground Combat Center and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Corona.

Orange County

The Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos is home to 850 personnel. But on some weekends, the base swells with 3,500 military reservists and National Guard members.

City Manager Henry Taboada said that while the city would survive without the base, it would prefer that it stay open.

“The base is a good neighbor providing many good services to the city,” he said. “We would be very pleased if it doesn’t close.”

In mounting save-the-base campaigns, the state’s community alliances have tried to fight smarter, arguing that California bases are even more important to the military than to local economies.

“The economic argument resonates with the state’s elected officials,” said Aro, of the South Bay alliance. “With the Pentagon, we’re talking about the fact that, if the base were closed, it would have a negative impact on mission success.”

Retired Air Force Col. Ed Peura, who was chief of staff of the Los Angeles Air Force Base’s Space and Missile Systems Center from 1989 to 1991, explained that closing or relocating the base would “increase the risk to the program. It might result in a satellite launch failure or the premature ... failure of a satellite.”

That could mean “a satellite would be missing, and it would cause a gap in coverage” that would affect ground troops or national security, he said.

Fewer than 1,400 of the base’s 4,500 local jobs are held by military personnel. If the base were to move to Colorado Springs, Colo., which has been lobbying hard for it, or elsewhere, only 20% of civilian staff would be likely to move with it, based on past experience, Redondo Beach Councilman Parsons said.

“Obviously, if the Pentagon says, ‘We’re moving,’ the military jobs are going. They’re saying, ‘Yes, sir.’ But the nonmilitary employees don’t have to say, ‘Yes, sir.’ They have options,” he said.

Seasoned nonmilitary employees are an enormous asset to the country’s defense, a unique cache of intellectual capital that remains in Southern California because of its lifestyle, sunny days and the proximity of Caltech and other research centers, supporters say.

If those veteran civilian engineers stay behind, Peura said, “you lose the experience base.”

“What we have [at the base now] are people who have been involved since space was invented,” he said, alluding to the birth of the American space program in the early 1960s.

Ending the synergy that comes from having the base near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge and other top research and development facilities, he said, “would be dumb as dirt.”

Whatever Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decides, supporters of the bases say they will continue to fight.

The list goes to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which can modify it. Both the president and Congress must approve the final list before bases start closing, probably sometime next year.

If the Los Angeles Air Force Base is on the hit list, Aro said, the alliance will raise $500,000 to fight to get it off.

Times staff writers David Haldane, Catherine Saillant and Veronica Torrejon contributed to this report.