Towns Foresee ‘Devastation’ if Ft. Ord Is Shut

Sharper than any bayonet, the Pentagon’s pens on Friday recommended carving 11 California sites--seven of them major ones--out of the nation’s military network.

First among them is Ft. Ord, for half a century the Army’s stalwart West Coast base, where 50,000 recruits at a time once trained for combat in its steep valleys and cold sand dunes.

Also on the hit list are smaller California bases, places long stitched into the economic and social fabric of their towns: the Marines’ air station in Tustin and the venerable Long Beach Naval Station--which virtually turned Long Beach into a Navy town and has evaded this kind of cut for so long that most believed it could never happen.

In Seaside, which for years has made itself hospitable to Ft. Ord’s soldiers, Mayor Lance McClair, a Navy veteran and the son of a Ft. Ord Army man, said his town of 38,000 is looking at “real devastation.”

“It’s a real jilt on the part of the Administration. They are stepping on the interests of the little people. Where is the peace dividend?” he asked. “They owe us something. Just to rip (the base) out is so cold.”

At this point, it has only been recommended that the sites be closed, and small-town mayors and big-time congressmen already are climbing into battle dress to try stop the bureaucratic death process. But, even if the closures are ordered, no bases would be padlocked for several years.

By the Pentagon’s reckoning, the proposed closings mean as many as 26,869 fewer military and civilian jobs in California. From Monterey Bay to Long Beach, business and civic leaders are counting thousands of jobs and millions of dollars that could be lost.

There was reckoning, too, of the land that could become rich real estate--or could be loaded with the toxic byproducts of rehearsals for war. Monterey County Supervisor Sam Karas estimated that 8,500 of Ft. Ord’s 28,000 coastal acres are contaminated with benzene, petroleum products or lead from the shooting ranges--a $350-million cleanup project.

Karas, using words like “disastrous” and “depression,” predicted cataclysm in Marina and Seaside, towns that Ft. Ord has shored up economically for decades.

Schools and shops will close, the towns’ mayors warned; the population will fall, and unemployment will rise. Ft. Ord, with nearly 15,000 military and 7,000 civilian employees generating $700 million a year, is Monterey County’s third largest industry, behind agriculture and tourism.

In Marina, where yellow ribbons still flutter from car antennas, Leila Calamia owns Jimmy-Lei’s pawnshop. Strapped GIs from Ft. Ord bring in their Japanese-made boom boxes and cameras to hock, “to buy bread and milk” when money runs short at month’s end. Said Calamia: “I think Marina is going to die.”

Gov. Pete Wilson told a Capitol press conference Friday that he will resist the proposed Ft. Ord closing; his U.S. Senate successor, John Seymour (R-Calif.), plans to hold hearings to ask the Defense Department to justify the decision.

But Wilson acknowledged that Congress is “serious about closing bases . . . . What we have to bear in mind is (that) they have been given certain parameters, a framework in which they are compelled to work. They do have to cut. They do have to reduce costs. We will seek to change their minds about specific bases, but they are going to have to close some.”

Long Beach is among the cities that are more economically resilient, but Friday’s news left it no less stunned. “We’re unhappy, because we’ve always felt we’ve been a good Navy town,” said Long Beach Councilman Tom Clark.

David Busto, a damage control fireman recruit on the Navy vessel Reuben James in Long Beach, said: “They want us to go out and defend our country, but they don’t want to pay us for it. I thought we were on the untouchable list.”

When the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin opened 49 years ago as a blimp base for anti-submarine patrols, it was set among the groves and fields of Orange County. Now, not everyone will be sorry to see the base and its 3,500-Marine operations depart. It is surrounded by high-priced neighborhoods, and back-yard sunbathers sometimes gripe about the helicopters shuttling overhead.

The low military value and high commercial value of the 1,600 acres put it high on the list for extinction. Tustin and the larger El Toro base, which remains open, are worth about $425 million a year to Orange County. “There are some towns that would fold up if the military went away,” said a Marine who asked not to be identified. “They would become ghost towns. Tustin will not have that effect in Orange County.”

The list of proposed closures came out, ironically, before the dust has fully settled on Desert Storm, the country’s biggest military triumph in years. But, with the Cold War shoved onto the shelf alongside the history books, and enough red ink in the budget to float anybody’s navy, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney plans to cut military personnel 25% by 1995. And fewer people need fewer bases.

Three times in the last decade, Ft. Ord has evaded the budget knife. On Friday, although Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley) said that he would fight this closure, too, he added that “there is a certain relief in knowing that this year, one way or another, this issue will be resolved.”

Camil Shaheen and his mother, Reva Khoury, have been trying to sell Mr. C’s deli since they heard last year that Ord was on the hit list. They’ve had only one inquiry. On Friday, while slapping mustard onto hoagie sandwiches for a line of hungry GIs in fatigues, he said, “Nobody would touch a business in Marina” then; now, “we can just sell the equipment,” not the business.

Maybe, he said sarcastically, “we’ll go on government assistance.”

Ft. Ord is home to the 7th Light Infantry Division, which saw action in the Just Cause operation in Panama in 1989. The division is to move to Ft. Lewis outside Tacoma, Wash.

Ft. Ord was originally Camp Ord when it was activated in 1940, named after E.O.C. Ord, the Civil War general who made the first survey and map of Los Angeles.

Among the possible uses for its deactivated acreage, under a proposal drafted by a committee set up by Panetta, is a four-year university--ultimately the most profitable plan. Other possible uses are low-income housing or turning its 440-bed hospital into a county hospital.

When the 240-acre Long Beach Naval Station and the Long Beach Naval Hospital showed up on the base closure list, officials were stunned that their lobbying efforts had succeeded--and failed. They had striven to keep the naval shipyard open but never figured that the naval station next door might be axed.

“Everyone was caught off guard,” said City Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, whose district includes both. The 53-year-old station is home to 38 ships and has about 16,000 military and 1,000 civilian personnel.

Braude, who was in Washington, D.C., just this week, said that “we were consistently told the only facility in jeopardy was the shipyard . . . . Now we’re faced with a whole new set of facts. None of us expected this. It doesn’t make any sense . . . . We thought we were home free . . . . Believe me, we will have a major push to save that station.”

Shipyard officials said their jobs may yet be at risk. “If they shut down the station, someday they’ll say, ‘We have a shipyard in the middle of nowhere,’ and then shut us down, too,” said Darrell Neft, a shipyard worker and union officer.

Outside the shipyard’s main gate, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) held a press conference to stress the “good news”--that the shipyard’s 4,000 civilian jobs had been saved from the chopping block. Even if the naval station were shut, Rohrabacher said, he thought enough business would remain to sustain the shipyard.

“The base at this time is certainly an important part of the local economy,” Rohrabacher remarked. “But the base is not here to provide jobs for the local economy. It’s here to provide strength and security for the United States of America and, if it’s no longer necessary, we’ve got to ensure that this main asset is put to use in other ways.”

The naval hospital, built in 1967, has 341 civilian and 736 military workers. Its 145 beds can be increased to as many as 562, and it serves 163,993 military personnel and dependents in the Los Angeles area, a spokesman said.

The Navy was an integral part of Long Beach for several decades. But, in 1974, it pulled 63 ships and 20,000 sailors out of town and transferred most of its operation to San Diego. That left the Long Beach Naval Station reclassified as a support facility, with only four ships. In 1979, the station was recommissioned and the Navy made a strong comeback.

Trying to look on the bright side, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said in Washington that developing the Tustin base could add millions of dollars to local property tax rolls.

“In Orange County, we have an extraordinarily sophisticated and diversified economy,” Cox said, “so maintaining this base is not simply a matter of protecting the local pork barrel.”

One military source said residents worry that El Toro could be converted into a new Orange County international airport, and, “If they think they have noise now, just imagine if there were 747s and L-1011s taking off there around the clock.”

Military officials in Washington said the Tustin Marines will move operations to Twentynine Palms and Camp Pendleton.

The Tustin base was decommissioned on June 5, 1949, but reactivated on May 1, 1951, during the Korean War, and became used for helicopters. Two hangars there are considered the largest unsupported wooden structures in the world, both designated national landmarks. Marines recently spent $11 million to put new roofs on the hangars.

What happens to them now? “That will be the problem of someone else,” one Marine said. “They cost millions of dollars to maintain.”

The proposed closing of Hunters Point Annex Naval Station in San Francisco was applauded by local officials, who want to develop the 515-acre prime waterfront parcel. A spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos called it “an enormous windfall.”

Local artists who have lived on the base since the 1970s on leased naval property cheered too. Margie O’Driscoll, acting director of the San Francisco Arts Commission, said the artists at Hunters Point--the largest artists’ colony in the United States--would now be able to extend their leases and entrench their artistic community.

There were smiles as well in San Diego, whose bases stand to gain ships and about 6,000 personnel from those targeted for closure.

“The impact on San Diego is positive and reflects how the military values San Diego,” said Capt. Jim Mitchell, a Navy spokesman in Washington D.C. “When you don’t have the luxury of keeping all the facilities because of budget and forces being reduced, you have to decide which ones you must keep and the others have to go . . . . San Diego made the cut.”

The net loss of 660 personnel from the closing of two minor San Diego facilities would be offset by the gains.

Defense Secretary Cheney recommended also that Castle Air Force Base in Merced, the Sacramento Army Depot and Moffett Field in Sunnyvale be closed. Also slated for closure are a small naval space systems facility in Los Angeles, two San Diego test facilities and an engineering center in Vallejo.

Contributing to this story were Bettina Boxall, Roxana Kopetman and Chris Woodyard in Long Beach, Christopher Elliott in San Francisco, George Frank in Tustin, Jerry Gillam in Sacramento, Bob Stewart in Washington and Nora Zamichow in San Diego. Morrison reported from Los Angeles and Morain from Marina.

NEXT STEP

The defense secretary will present his base-closing list to Congress and the independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which has until July 1 to review the recommendations. The panel will hear testimony from lawmakers, military officials, citizens and business representatives before forwarding its conclusions to the White House. President Bush must accept or reject the list by July 15. After Congress receives the list from Bush, it has 45 days, or until the end of the current session, to either approve or disapprove the entire package. It cannot amend the list.