Some Communities Detect Benefits in Base Closings : Military: Redevelopment may aid tax rolls. But proposals for the homeless outrank parks or airports.

When the citizens of Anniston, Ala., found out last month that nearby Ft. McClellan was on the list of proposed Pentagon base closings, they reacted with anguish and anger. But as the shock wore off, they took a second look--and began to relax.

In the three weeks since the announcement, Annistonians have come up with a spate of novel ideas for transforming a potential economic disaster into a second chance. Some want to convert the sprawling, 46,000-acre Army training center into a space research facility; others have suggested turning it into a retirement community. And still others are pushing to develop a first-class industrial park that would fuel the local economy for years to come--and put government land back onto the tax rolls.

Anniston isn’t the only community that has rethought the base-closings issue. Less than a month after Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney unveiled the Pentagon “hit list,” politicians, business people and community leaders who live near targeted installations across the country are working hard to develop profitable new uses for their bases, even before the closing decisions are final. Congress will have the last word on the latest round of closings sometime this summer.

In Northern California, Sunnyvale and Mountain View are working with NASA and a consortium of aerospace firms on a plan to rescue research facilities at Moffett Field Naval Air Station. In Orange County, some envision a multimillion-dollar commercial, industrial and residential development where the Marine Corps Air Station at Tustin now stands. And there are those who believe Castle Air Force Base in Merced would be just the right spot for a new campus for the University of California.

Despite an abundance of ideas, some practical and some outlandish--a proposed spaceport at George Air Force Base in San Bernardino County, for example--California and other states affected by base closings cannot count on a cornucopia of new regional airports, parks and high-speed rail terminals in the immediate future. Like most things that the federal government does, disposing of surplus military bases is neither simple nor straightforward.

The right of first refusal, for example, goes to the homeless. The 1987 McKinney Homeless Assistance Act requires the Pentagon to consider proposals for homeless shelters before it even thinks about parks, airports or college campuses.

After that, federal, state and local government agencies are invited to take a look, with preferential consideration for proposals to build educational or health facilities, wildlife conservation areas, airports--or parks. Only then can private enterprise bid on the base property.

In addition to the long list of arcane laws, rules and regulations that govern disposition of military property, the toxic waste buried on many of the bases will further complicate the process--and perhaps turn some of the community dreams into nightmares.

“There are still bases left over from the ‘70s (closings), still in government ownership,” says Richard Anderson, a civilian who heads the real estate office of the U.S. Marine Corps. Anderson cites the former Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland, closed in 1976, where contamination from asbestos in buildings and underground fuel tanks has been a long-standing--and so far unresolved--concern. Eleven of the 43 installations on the Pentagon closure list unveiled last month have serious problems with toxic waste, munitions and other types of contamination.

Since the early 1960s, when the first wave of modern base closings began under President John F. Kennedy, the Pentagon has shut down several hundred military installations across the country. But a 1990 Pentagon study reported that the 158,000 new civilian jobs created at the former bases through local and state redevelopment efforts more than compensated for the 93,000 military jobs that were lost. Sometimes, however, creating the new jobs took years.

“Often, the bases can be reused and redeveloped with increases in civilian employment and enhanced economic activity for the community,” says Jonathan Gill, a policy analyst with Business Executives for National Security, a private research group that has studied the base closing issue.

At 75 former bases, for example, neighboring communities and state governments built industrial parks. Airports took over sites at 42 former military installations. Fifty-seven closed bases now support four-year colleges, community colleges and vocational-technical education programs, with enrollments totaling more than 160,000.

The Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics is building nuclear submarines at the former Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, which was closed in 1973. There is an international airport on the grounds of the old Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh, N.Y., which employs 1,000 workers. And a private retirement community for military personnel was built at the Glasgow Air Force Base in Montana, which went out of business in 1968.

But none of those success stories was on the minds of Anniston residents when they first heard that the Pentagon had plans to close Ft. McClellan. The base, opened in 1917, is home to about 10,000 permanent military residents and 18,000 troops who each year train at the Military Police and Chemical Corps schools.

“The first reaction, when it was just in the wind last year, was ‘We’re going to fight it,’ ” says H. Brandt Ayers, editor and publisher of the Anniston Star, a 35,000-circulation daily that is the major paper between Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta.

Although the community still officially opposes the closing, Ayers says, a new sentiment is in the air these days: “If they don’t want us, we don’t want them. By God, we can take it. We’ll get our act together and we’ll move on.”

To that end, community leaders have begun looking to the state Legislature for seed money to help pay for redevelopment. And the Chamber of Commerce has hired a marketing consultant, who already has come up with a slogan: “The Greater Anniston Market: Near Atlanta, Near Birmingham, Near Perfect.”

One of the ideas being kicked around is creation of additional research facilities for Boeing Defense & Space Group, based in Huntsville, which is a major contractor for the space station Freedom and other NASA and Department of Defense projects.

Ayers likes the notion of establishing an up-scale retirement community in conjunction with a new consulting firm whose employees would be leading retired engineers and business people. And an industrial park also is on the list.

“We’re going to have to have some people in here to thump it, and sniff it, and turn it over in their hands, and tell us, ‘It fits here, it doesn’t fit here,’ ” Ayers says.

But before Anniston’s local government or private industry can get its hands on the McClellan property, the base--or at least pieces of it--must be offered up to the homeless and the federal government.

That part of the process concerns community leaders throughout the country.

Leslie Anne Pontious, the mayor pro tem of Tustin, Calif., testified at a hearing in Los Angeles last week conducted by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which was created last year to provide an independent review of the latest round of Pentagon shutdown notices.

“We basically accept the fact that (the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station) is going to close,” Pontious says. “We just want to make sure the (new) use is economically beneficial to the community. We are not interested in seeing a jail, or who knows?”

Under the 1987 McKinney Act, the first crack at surplus military bases will go to the homeless. The law requires the Pentagon to make available to the Department of Housing and Urban Development a list of surplus property. HUD publishes the list, and nonprofit groups that provide homeless services apply for the free use of all or part of the property.

The latest round of base closings is only the second to take place since the McKinney Act was passed, and the Pentagon’s experience with the law is limited. But at least one homeless group has submitted an application to use part of the former Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire, the first base from the 1988 closings to become available as surplus property.

After the property is screened for possible use for the homeless, other federal agencies are allowed to stake a claim, although few have done so in recent years.

State and local government agencies are next to have a shot. If they want the property for education, health, parks, airports, highways, historic monuments or wildlife conservation, the law says they do not have to pay for it.

The most serious problem associated with the reuse of former military bases involves the hundreds of thousands of barrels of solvents and fuel, and the thousands of pounds of munitions that were dumped or burned on them during the last half-century.

In California, five of the bases on the latest Pentagon “hit list” have serious environmental problems, according to state officials. They are Castle Air Force Base, Moffett Field, the Sacramento Army Depot, Ft. Ord near Monterey and Hunters Point Annex in San Francisco Bay. And the Pentagon must find the money to pay for the cleanup before the contaminated sites can be developed for industrial, commercial or residential use. The cleanup estimate for Ft. Ord alone comes to about $400 million.

“The one thing we want to avoid in base closures is the worst of all possible worlds,” says Rich Sybert, director of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Office of Planning and Research, “--having bases close with the devastating economic impact and then being left with sites that are not reusable.”