Imperial Beach Seeks the Title to Navy Base

Milford W. Portwood, an Imperial Beach real estate broker, has gone to Washington this week with a dollar in his pocket. He hopes to come back with the bill of sale for 1,200 acres of prime government land and a solution to the South Bay city’s perennial noise problem.

Portwood hopes to convince local congressmen and the Department of Defense to sell Ream Field, a Navy helicopter practice field within the city limits, to the City of Imperial Beach.

More realistically, he’d settle for 284 acres. The city wants that much acreage for a light industrial park and would let the rest revert to the federal fish and game agencies to become part of the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge.

With one deft political maneuver, Portwood hopes to bring peace and quiet to his home town by removing the intrusive sound of dozens of helicopters circling the southern part of the city weekdays from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Technically, Ream Field is no longer an active Navy base. Since 1976, it has been an adjunct of North Island Naval Air Station and has been used as a giant practice pad for Navy helicopter crews training to become anti-submarine guardians of the U.S. fleet.

If it seems that IB residents are a bit touchy about a few helicopters overhead, consider that Ream Field records more yearly takeoffs and landings--294,000 or so--than does the nation’s busiest commercial airport, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. That’s 1,100-plus takeoffs and landings each weekday, or 550-plus helicopters a day making low-level passes over Imperial Beach residential areas, including the city’s “gold coast”--south Seacoast Drive where Portwood lives.

Portwood and other city leaders are attempting to convince the federal government that what Imperial Beach needs is fewer choppers overhead and more jobs on the ground. They say that the helicopters should be transferred to Camp Pendleton or Brown Field, areas farther from homes. Ream Field, they contend, should be transformed from its mishmash of aging warehouses and barracks housing government surplus into a thriving industrial commercial center--something the nation’s southwesternmost city does not have space for outside the sprawling base.

The problem of helicopter noise has been plaguing the city for years, but a recent query by the California National Guard brought the matter to an explosive boil. The National Guard proposed to “relocate the 140th Infantry Division and its helicopters from Los Alamitos to Ream Field.”

Alerted by Bulletin

That bad news was announced in a South Bay alert bulletin by a newly formed community group named HUSH--Help Us Stop Helicopters.

At a noisy, emotion-packed public City Council meeting in mid-March, IB townsfolk vented their wrath at the irritating helicopter noise and testified that they’d take up arms and fight before they’d let another bunch of whirlybirds invade the community’s airspace on weekdays and weekends too.

IB veterinarian Mike McCoy, a HUSH leader, ignites like a Roman candle over the subject of helicopter noise, linking words like “hazardous,” “noisy,” “polluting” and “uncontrolled” with the helicopters’ daily touch-and-go practice.

“It’s a dirty, stinking, noisy facility,” McCoy said of Ream Field. The weekday merry-go-round of buzzing helicopters “spewing unspent fuel out on the homes below” is “annoying” and “obnoxious,” he said.

McCoy classifies the helicopter noise as more than a nuisance. It gnaws at the residents’ mental health, “makes youth edgy” and turns adults “aggressive,” he said. Why, he wonders, not require helicopters to practice at large military installations? Why allow them to fly over residential areas, threatening the safety of citizens and waking babies?

After listening to an hour or two of pent-up anger by constituents, the Imperial Beach City Council did the politic thing: It voted 5-0 to oppose the National Guard proposal to locate at Ream Field.

A North Island Naval Air Station administrator, asking not to be identified, admitted that the Navy has an “image problem” in southern Imperial Beach because of the helicopter operations at Ream. “We even have had reports by pilots that they have been fired on from the ground,” he said, adding that no casualties or damage have been reported. “But, what are we going to do? Those kids (pilots) need plenty of practice.”

Guard Move May Be Dead

State National Guard public affairs officer Steve Mensik suspects that the Guard proposal to move to Ream has been kayoed with a punch aimed at another enemy, the Navy.

Guard helicopters have been operating out of Los Alamitos, a former Navy air base in Orange County, for a decade now with only infrequent growls from the surrounding civilians, he said. And, when a complaint comes in, it isn’t filed in the wastebasket. A legitimate noise complaint can result in a change in flight patterns and in heights, he said.

National Guard officials stepped into a hornet’s nest when they approached Imperial Beach officials and the Navy about use of Ream Field as home base for a new Army National Guard helicopter company with a complement of 14 helicopters, 33 full-time officers and 125 weekend warriors, he admitted. That’s hardly a division, Mensik pointed out.

He hopes to earn “a second chance” with Imperial Beach citizenry after the dust of the first set-to settles, and his sales pitch is interesting.

The National Guard unit would mean about $1 million to the IB economy and would provide helicopter backup to all of the San Diego region in event of brush fires, disasters and search-and-rescue missions. That, Mensik said, is a major part of the National Guard’s work.

To spooked Imperial Beach residents, Mensik can only say: “Give us a chance to show you what it would be like to have us here.” National Guard helicopters do not fly low-level circles over populated areas, he said. They take off, rise to a height of 1,000 or more feet and head for the unpopulated hills to hone their skills. He estimated that the Guard helicopters would average four or five flights a day on weekdays, 10 a day on weekends.

Move Would Be Cheap

The reason that the Guard is so keen on Ream Field is purely economic, Mensik said. It would take a few months and about $250,000 to fix up the old firehouse and a couple of unused barracks at Ream; it would take $7 million to $10 million and five to seven years to build new facilities at some other San Diego site, such as Brown Field.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Portwood is making the rounds of San Diego legislators, as Imperial Beach’s emissary, seeking to get Mayor Henry Smith’s point across--that the South Bay city has not shared in the growth and affluence that its Sunbelt neighbors have enjoyed, that it’s time somebody in power remembered the city and its voters and did something nice for Imperial Beach, such as hand over a chunk of unused real estate named Ream Field.