Panel Adds 36 Bases to Closure List : Military: Long Beach Naval Shipyard and the San Diego Naval Training Center are among six in California cited by the commission for possible shutdown or realignment.

The federal commission created to review proposed military base closings Friday added another 36 installations, including the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, to the list of bases under consideration for phase-out or force reductions.

The unexpected action by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission significantly expands the initial pool of 43 military facilities that the Pentagon has recommended closing. It provoked immediate objections from lawmakers and local officials who had assumed that their bases were spared.

“I have said all along that we won’t rubber-stamp the defense secretary’s proposals,” said commission Chairman Jim Courter, a former New Jersey congressman. “And I have cautioned everyone not to assume that their installation is safe just because it is not included in the Pentagon’s report.”

Last year, about 600 Orange County residents worked at the Long Beach yard, according to the Southern California Committee to Save Our Shipyard. Their salaries, and contracts held by county companies with the shipyard, totaled about $21 million, the group said.

In addition to the Long Beach yard, the commission said that it will study the possible closure of the San Diego Naval Training Center and Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco Bay. The panel said that it will consider cutbacks, but not closures, at three other military facilities in California: the Marine Corps Logistics Base at Barstow, the Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Center in San Diego and the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, also in San Diego.

In another controversial move, the commission said that it will examine the possibility of cutting back operations of the Army Corps of Engineers, a proposal that was rejected by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney when he unveiled the Pentagon’s list of recommended base closures in April. A hearing on that issue is scheduled Wednesday.

Courter said the expansion of the Pentagon’s initial list does not mean that closures or reductions of the 36 additional installations are foregone conclusions. “Only after further study will the commission decide whether any of these facilities should be considered candidates for closure or realignment,” he said.

The seven-member panel will meet Thursday to narrow down the new list. The installations selected as final candidates for closure or cutbacks could be added to the 43 military facilities that the Pentagon has recommended closing, or substituted for bases on the Pentagon list, officials said. The commission is scheduled to complete its work within a month.

“To make informed and independent judgments, we need to compare those installations that are on the Pentagon’s list with some installations that are not,” said Cary Walker, the commission’s director of communications.

“The (new) list . . . is a menu of options, it is nothing more than that,” Walker said. “These are very preliminary candidates . . . . We expect that list to shrink considerably on the sixth of June when the commissioners meet.”

Despite that note of assurance, members of Congress from California reacted swiftly to news that the Long Beach Shipyard, which employs more than 4,000 people, could become a candidate for closure.

“The Long Beach Naval Shipyard emerges as an example of a naval facility that should stay open precisely as the Pentagon budget goes down and security threats to our country evolve,” states a letter signed by Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) and Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach), Glenn M. Anderson (D-San Pedro) and Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles).

Rohrabacher, whose district includes the shipyard, speculated that it was placed on the commission’s new list of closure candidates because of strong pressure from members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation. The Pennsylvania congressmen are fighting to save the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which the Pentagon has targeted for closure.

“It’s not a big surprise,” Rohrabacher said, “because Philadelphia has made it their main tactic to focus on the Long Beach yard. But, in the long run, they are not going to succeed.”

The Pentagon had already recommended closing the Long Beach Naval Station.

Meanwhile, Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-San Diego) said he believes that the commission will not go after those facilities.

“When the commission looks at all the facts, I am confident that it will conclude that these San Diego installations are an essential and cost-effective part of our national defense,” Cunningham said.

Navy and Marine officials in San Diego said they were caught by surprise by Friday’s announcement. At a midday press conference, Maj. Gen. John S. Grinalds, the commanding general of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, said he does not know what the commission’s recommendation that his facility be studied “for realignment” means.

“I have called our authorities at Headquarters Marine Corps (in Washington) on two occasions this morning, . . . and they don’t know what it means, either,” said Grinalds, who added that the Corps has considered incorporating the depot into Camp Pendleton but has found both “pros and cons” in the idea.

More than half of the 40,000 Marines recruited annually are trained at the recruit depot.

The San Diego Naval Training Center, which the commission listed as a candidate for realignment or closure, provides basic training and special naval skills to about 40,000 sailors each year. The Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Center, a relatively small facility that was recommended for closure on the defense secretary’s list in April, was also recommended to be studied for realignment.

Some San Diego civic leaders speculated that the Marine recruit depot and the San Diego Naval Training Center appear on the commission’s list in an attempt to placate other regions that have been told they may lose facilities.

“Florida is saying, ‘Why not close San Diego instead of Orlando?’ ” said Lee Grissom, president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, who plans to help make the case for San Diego when commission members visit here in coming weeks.

The Pentagon on April 12 proposed the closure of 31 major military bases and 12 minor installations, including 11 facilities in California. The California closures would result in the net loss of nearly 27,000 military and civilian jobs. Among the major California bases on the Pentagon’s list are Ft. Ord near Monterey, Castle Air Force Base in Merced, the Long Beach Naval Station, the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin and the Moffett Field Naval Air Station in Sunnyvale.

In originally announcing the proposed closures, Cheney said that, during the next five years, the U.S. military will be reduced by 25%--roughly 500,000 men and women--and that he could not justify keeping open all 495 of the nation’s major military posts.

The base closure commission, appointed by President Bush, is reviewing the Pentagon’s plans and has the authority to add or delete bases from the Pentagon list. The commission is to forward its recommendations to President Bush by July 1.

The President has until July 15 to approve or disapprove the commission’s recommended list. If he approves it, the list goes to the Congress, which cannot make any changes and must approve or reject the list in its entirety. If Congress fails to adopt a joint resolution disapproving the list within 45 days, the defense secretary may begin closing the bases.

The elaborate base-closing procedure is spelled out in legislation enacted last year after an attempt by the Bush Administration to shut down or realign more than 200 military bases was swamped by a tidal wave of congressional criticism.

The success or failure of this year’s effort to shut down military installations is seen in Washington as a measure of the nation’s resolve to make the significant cuts in the military infrastructure that are required by the shrinking defense Establishment.

At a press conference Friday, Walker fended off questions about the significance of the appearance of particular military installations on the commission’s new list. But that did not halt the speculation.

Rohrabacher noted that the commission has said that it will examine the potential closure of five new naval “home port” bases, still under construction, that were authorized during the military buildup of the Ronald Reagan Administration. The Pentagon had rejected that move, even though it was recommended in a study completed by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Rohrabacher said that the appearance of the new home ports on the commission list could be good news for the Long Beach Naval Station, which the Pentagon wants to close.

“The most significant aspect of the list we got today was that the home ports are on it for the first time,” Rohrabacher said. “The GAO report . . . indicated that it is much more cost effective to close down the construction of the new home ports and rely on facilities that are already available.”

If the Long Beach Naval Station remains open, Rohrabacher said, chances are that the shipyard also will be spared. The Long Beach Naval Shipyard, opened 48 years ago, employed a high of 7,000 workers in 1984. It is one of eight facilities in the nation equipped to repair and overhaul Navy vessels.

The announcement that the shipyard is back on the government’s hit list means that the city of Long Beach could lose all of its Navy facilities.

The Navy’s departure could mean an annual loss of more than $3 billion to the city’s economy. It would also deal a blow to the identity of a town that grew up with the Navy.

The news shocked city officials, who recently thought that they had won the fight to keep the shipyard alive. “We have argued this case over and over again,” said an exasperated Mayor Ernie Kell. “This is a profitable shipyard that returns money to the federal government. It just angers me that they keep putting the city and the shipyard through this.”

Officials at the yard described the atmosphere among workers as “chaos.” People poured into union offices asking about their jobs, many of them in tears.

“You go to bed at night and you wonder what you’ll hear from Washington in the morning,” said J. B. Larkins, president of the shipyard’s employee association. “Everybody is saying: ‘I can’t buy this car now, we can’t have that baby.’ All the normal things you do are put on hold.”

Kell has scheduled an emergency meeting Monday for a task force to save the Navy installations, and city officials said that they will lobby tirelessly to persuade the base closure commission to spare Long Beach.

“Long Beach loves being a Navy town,” Councilman Evan Braude said. “We’ve gone through several wars and a lot of headaches, and we are not going to roll over and play dead.”

The San Diego Naval Training Center was commissioned in 1923 and occupies about 550 acres along the north shore of San Diego Bay. The center graduates about 5,900 personnel annually from its Recruit Training Command and Service School Command.

The Barstow Marine Corps Logistics Base, which employs about 1,800 civilians and 700 military personnel, buys, builds and repairs equipment for other Marine Corps facilities in the western half of the United States. The base is situated on three separate tracts totaling about 5,600 acres.

The Treasure Island Naval Station, built in the 1930s as a site for the Golden Gate International Exposition, is home to the headquarters of the 12th Marine Corps District and the Yerba Buena Island Coast Guard Station. Treasure Island has a military population of 3,000 and employs about 1,000 civilian workers.

At a press conference in San Francisco, Mayor Art Agnos said that he welcomed the possible closure of the 403-acre man-made island, situated under the Bay Bridge span, calling it a “splendid piece of property.”

“This is an opportunity for San Francisco to continue on the path of economic conversion for peacetime use-,” Agnos said.

Staff writers Fay Fiore in Long Beach, Dan Morain in San Francisco and Amy Wallace in San Diego contributed to this story.

MILITARY EXODUS: Threatened shipyard closure is the most recent in a series of blows to Long Beach. A18

Targeted Facilities in California

In April, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposed shutting 31 major military bases nationally, including 11 in California. Following is a list of five additional bases in California, announced Friday, that are being studied for possible closure or realignment .A small San Diego facility, the Naval Electronics Systems Engineering Center, was listed Friday for possible realignment. Earlier it had been listed for possible closure. Treasure Island Naval Station, San Francisco Area: 403 acres Function: Support Pacific Fleet Personnel: 3,000 military, 1,000 civilian. Commissioned: 1941 Status: Studied for closure or realignment U.S. Marine Corps Logistics Base, Barstow Area: 5,687 acres Function: Supplies, equipment and training Personnel: 700 military and 1,800 civilians Commissioned: 1942 Status: Studied for realignment Long Beach Naval Shipyard, Long Beach Area: 347 acres Function: Ship repair and overhall Personnel: 37 military and 4,100 civilian Commissioned: 1943 Status: Studied for closure Naval Training Center, San Diego Area: 546 acres Function: Recruit and apprentice training Personnel: 11,833 military and 168 civilian Commissioned: 1923 Status: Studied for realignment or closure Marine Recruit Training Depot, San Diego Area: 388 acres Function: Western recruiting region headquarters Personnel: 2,000 military; up to 5,000 recruits, 800 civilian Commissioned: 1921 Status: Studied for realignment Compiled by Times researcher Cecilia Rasmussen