Bilbray Says Miramar’s Fate Not Up to Navy : Aviation: The county supervisor and Navy officials exchanged heated words at a meeting on alternative airport sites.

In some of the most heated discussion yet over whether a new regional airport should be located at Miramar Naval Air Station, County Supervisor Brian Bilbray told Navy officials Thursday that the final decision will be made by civilians and not the military, which vehemently opposes moving from Miramar.

“The Navy doesn’t decide. . . . This is a civilian government, and Congress is the one that has the final say. It’s Congress that controls the budget and controls base closings,” Bilbray said. He added that, unlike the San Diego of the 1960s, the community in the ‘90s and in the next century won’t “be dependent on every military” installation staying in the county.

Bilbray made his comments at a meeting held by a San Diego Assn. of Governments policy advisory committee to discuss the results of a new $385,000 study that analyzed three airport sites as alternatives to congested Lindbergh Field.

The report, released earlier this week, concludes that all three locations--Otay Mesa, Miramar and a site east of the naval air station--are technically superior to Lindbergh Field in that they can accommodate the region’s annual 40 million airline passengers expected by the middle of the next century.

The Navy has said it will not give up Miramar--home of the well-known “Top Gun” fighter pilot school--because it considers the base crucial to the training of pilots who must land on aircraft carriers.

“Whatever the answer to airport (relocation) . . . the answer doesn’t rest with the Navy or the military structure,” Bilbray said. “It will be a political decision made by the Armed Services Committee” of Congress, he said.

“The Navy doesn’t have veto power over our elected officials. . . . The fact is, (Miramar) is the only option, and we all ought to be frank about it,” he said.

Bilbray’s comments brought a retort from Capt. Thomas R. Mitchell, the Navy’s official representative on the committee.

“We recognize that the budget comes from Congress . . . but (we spend) our budget pretty much how we please,” Mitchell said. “You don’t start at the top” in making cuts.

“I don’t think people have the understanding of how this goes. . . . You can keep revisiting (the Miramar option) all you want . . . (but) if you think the will of San Diego will override the will of the country, I think you’re mistaken,” Mitchell said.

Replied Bilbray: “You’re the country?”

A Navy captain at Thursday’s meeting called the air station the Navy’s best and possibly the best in all the military. The Navy estimates it would cost at least $8 billion to replace the sprawling facility of almost 24,000 acres.

Bilbray, who said his father was a Navy pilot, as is his brother, maintains that Miramar is the region’s only realistic choice as a long-term solution to crowding at Lindbergh, in part because pending residential and industrial development on Otay Mesa precludes the construction of a large airport at Brown Field there.

“How long will we be diverted from biting the bullet?” Bilbray asked the committee, of which he is a member. “It really comes down to one option.”

Capt. Larry Pearson, Miramar’s commanding officer, forcefully made the case for the Navy staying at Miramar. He said that, unlike other military air bases that share facilities with civilian airliners, Miramar trains fighter pilots and others to land on aircraft carriers, and the base’s runways are outfitted with special arresting gears.

As part of training pilots for carrier landings, the Navy practices constant touch-and-go landings requiring steep takeoffs and sharp turns, procedures that would make mingling with civilian airliners dangerous and would impinge on Navy operations, he said.

Pearson, who used a slide show to get his points across, also said that, because of global conflicts, there will be more, not less, pressure to use aircraft carriers.

Those who want to use Miramar have argued that the Navy can move its operations to El Centro in the Imperial Valley, where it also trains pilots and conducts 10% of its operations. But Pearson said the desert town is too small and not capable of accommodating Miramar’s 37,000 people, including the military, civilians and their dependents.

“The infrastructure just does not exist. Where will families dependent on two incomes find comparable employment?” Pearson asked.

He detailed other reasons against El Centro, including longer flying times and more fuel consumption. Pearson painted a scenario in which young pilots undergoing carrier-landing training might get only one chance at landing on a carrier located off-shore and then be forced to leave the scene to get more fuel.

“If they have to go over the hill, they might have one look at the flight deck and” then they’d be gone, he said.

But Bilbray said he had talked to pilots, “the people who fly the missions,” and they aren’t as concerned about losing Miramar as Pearson and other top Navy officials claim.

Bilbray noted that, during the last round of base closings approved by Congress, neither the Navy nor the Marine Corps was hit hard, but that things may be different as Congress looks at making more cutbacks in the military’s budget.

Bilbray said San Diego was much more dependent on the Navy in the 1960s, when questions were raised then about using Miramar as San Diego’s major civilian airport. But San Diego is different now, he said, and moving an installation the size of Miramar won’t harm the city in the ‘90s or into the next century.

San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts said that he found the Navy’s argument compelling, that he too had talked to rank-and-file Miramar pilots and that they had told him the Navy’s position is correct. Roberts, who has pushed for a dual-use regional airport split between Brown Field and Lindbergh, said it is clear the Navy won’t move from Miramar or share it with civilian planes.

That brought a response from Councilman Bob Filner, who said the committee is relying on information from only “one side.”

“Do you think a propaganda approach from one agency (the Navy) is going to convince me?” Filner asked.

Among other items in the 175-page report discussed at the meeting was that the cost of building an airport at East Miramar, estimated at $3.1 billion, excluding $276 million for road construction, might be so high as to put the site “out of consideration,” according to Dan G. Haney, a senior manager for KPMG Peat Marwick, the consulting firm that helped prepare the report.

The report also says that one way of financing a new airport is to redevelop Lindbergh Field with offices, hotels, retail stores and industrial buildings and use tax money generated from the development to pay for the airport. The report estimated that the San Diego Unified Port District could earn as much as $572 million a year from such a project.

However, the Port District called that figure as much too high, perhaps by a factor of 10. An economist with the San Diego Assn. of Governments said the estimate is based on gross revenues and not net revenues, as the Port District calculated.

The report will be considered today by Sandag’s board of directors.