Tustin Leaders Looking to Make Best of Base Closure : Military: They plan to turn a potential setback into a second chance for the Marine Corps Air Station.

When the citizens of Tustin learned last month that their Marine Corps Air Station was targeted for closing, they reacted with neither anguish nor anger. Instead, they began looking to the future.

In the month since the Pentagon’s announcement, local government and business leaders have come up with a spate of novel ideas for transforming a potential economic setback into a second chance.

Many want to convert the 1,200 acres that the Marines plan to discard into a first-class, mixed-use community of industries, businesses and homes that would fuel the local economy for years to come--and put valuable federal property back on the tax rolls. Some envision a special role, either commercial or recreational, for the two massive, World War II-era blimp hangars that loom over the site.

“I think it’s an opportunity,” said Richard B. Edgar, longtime Tustin councilman and five-time mayor. “There will be some short-term problems, but in the long run, I feel that we can . . . make sure what’s built there will enhance our community.”

The prospects for the successful conversion of military bases to lucrative civilian uses are greater in Orange County than in many parts of the country because of high land values and a burgeoning local market for jobs, goods and services. Even so, Tustin is not the only community that is rethinking the traditional reaction to base closings.

Just weeks after Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney unveiled the Pentagon’s latest “hit list” of 31 major military installations, seven of them in California, politicians, business people and community leaders who live near targeted facilities 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 closings sometime this summer.

In Northern California, the cities of Sunnyvale and Mountain View are working with NASA and a consortium of aerospace firms to rescue research facilities at Moffett Field Naval Air Station. In Anniston, Ala., local leaders are talking of converting Ft. McClellan, a sprawling, 46,000-acre Army training center, into a retirement community, an industrial park, or a space research laboratory. And in Merced, there are those who believe Castle Air Force Base would be just the right spot for a new University of California campus.

Despite an abundance of ideas, some practical and some outlandish, 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. After that, federal, state and local government agencies are invited to take a look, with preferential consideration going to proposals to build educational or health facilities, wildlife conservation areas, airports, or parks. Only then can private enterprise bid on the base property.

For many Tustin residents, who have complained for years of noise and the potential danger from Marine helicopter flights, the news of the planned closing was greeted with something resembling relief.

At a hearing last week conducted by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which is reviewing the Pentagon closure list, only one person stood up to oppose the Tustin closing. Earl R. Kiernan, a local physician, said the base should be preserved for use as a blimp center. Kiernan is president of a design group called Airships International Inc.

Albert M. Shifberg-Mencher, a director of the Tustin Chamber of Commerce, said he is concerned about shorter-term consequences of the pullout, including depression of the apartment market in the areas around the base.

Closing Tustin will “cause pressure to lower rents and defer maintenance,” Shifberg-Mencher said, “and I’m really concerned there is a potential here, if not handled properly, for a major change in the makeup of the population.”

Leslie Anne Pontious, Tustin’s mayor pro tem, also testified at the commission hearing. “We basically accept the fact that (the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station) is going to close,” Pontious said in an interview. “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?”

Before the city of Tustin or private industry can get its hands on the Marine property, the base, or at least pieces of it, must be offered to the homeless and the federal government. The Pentagon plans to hold on to about 400 acres of housing and other base facilities for use by Marines stationed at the nearby El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Under a 1987 law that bears the name of its sponsor, the late Rep. Stewart McKinney of Connecticut, the first crack at surplus military bases will go to the homeless. The McKinney Act 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 make application for the free use of all or part of the property, through the U.S. Public Health Service.

The latest round of base closings is only the second to occur since the McKinney Act was passed, and the Pentagon’s experience with the law is limited, officials said. 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.

After the property is screened for homeless use, other federal agencies are allowed to stake a claim, although few have done so in recent years. In one case, however, the Department of the Interior grabbed 7,600 acres of the 9,000-acre Ft. Meade near Washington for wildlife preservation, to the chagrin of the Pentagon.

State and local government agencies then 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. And that is a thorn in the side of the military.

“We want money for the land,” said one Pentagon official. “It serves no useful purpose if we’re just going to turn it over to the Department of Labor or Department of Agriculture.”

A 1990 Pentagon study of hundreds of closings since the early 1960s 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,” said 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, 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 defunct Glasgow Air Force Base in Montana, which went out of business in 1968.

Some of the dreams of new and beneficial uses of military bases may turn into nightmares because of toxic waste buried on many of the bases.

“There are still bases left over from the ‘70s (closings), still in government ownership,” said Richard Anderson, a civilian who heads the real estate office of the Marine Corps. He cited the former Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland, closed in 1976, where contamination from asbestos in buildings and underground fuel tanks has been a longstanding and, so far, unresolved concern.

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.

Eleven of the facilities on the Pentagon closure list unveiled last month have serious problems with toxic waste, munitions and other types of contamination. In California, five of the major 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. 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 problems at Tustin are said to be minimal because it was not used for heavy aircraft maintenance, but the base has its environmental hot spots, officials said. On the other hand, 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--having bases close with the devastating economic impact and then being left with sites that are not reusable,” said Rich Sybert, director of the Gov. Pete Wilson’s Office of Planning and Research.