Officials Defend Shipyard but Not the Base in Tustin

A federal commissioner who will help decide the fate of military facilities nationwide in less than three weeks toured two sites on the Pentagon’s “hit list” on Monday, drawing support from community leaders in Tustin but reproach in Long Beach.

In Long Beach, the battle to save the naval station, shipyard and hospital there from closure took on an air of desperation as local officials spent five hours pleading their case to retired Air Force Gen. Duane Cassidy.

Cassidy is one of seven members of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the panel that will make its final recommendations to President Bush by July 1 on what military installations should be closed in order to scale back Pentagon costs.

A helicopter’s ride away in Tustin, however, Cassidy’s meeting with local leaders was far shorter than in Long Beach--only about 90 minutes. And the response was far more cordial, even supportive to the possible closure of the Marine Corps Air Station at Tustin.

“All we did really was tell him we support the base closure,” said Tustin Mayor Charles E. Puckett, who attended the meeting with Cassidy and about half a dozen other officials from the city of Tustin, the local Chamber of Commerce and the office of Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach).

“It’s going to present some short-term hardships because the Marines have really been good neighbors, outside of all the noise, but we’re going to go along with whatever the decision is,” Puckett said. “We’re probably 70% sure that it’s going to close.”

Puckett and others in Tustin predict that the end of Marine operations there will prove a boon by opening up valuable federal land for commercial development.

Puckett said he believes that if the Pentagon relocates Tustin’s 3,500 Marines and 125 cargo helicopters to another base as proposed, the base land will ultimately bring more money into the local economy as a retail and/or research-and-development center.

In contrast, meeting behind closed doors in Long Beach, a team of congressmen, city leaders, union officials, military officers and Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) argued that closing the Long Beach installations would be unwise financially and leave the West Coast strategically “naked.”

“I am very much more enlightened than I was before,” Cassidy, a former Air Force pilot, said afterward. While noting that he was “impressed” with the Long Beach facilities, the general would not say whether the meetings had changed his thinking.

The Long Beach naval station, shipyard and hospital are among 79 military facilities marked for closure nationwide. President Bush appointed the commission to determine which bases are most cost-efficient and militarily strategic. Its closure recommendations ultimately will go to Congress, which has 45 days to approve or reject the list in its entirety.

Cassidy’s Southland visit will be the base-closure panel’s only tour of the local facilities before its final recommendations next month. At least one commissioner from the panel is scheduled to visit each of the installations on the “hit list” by July 1.

The Pentagon has recommended that some military bases be shut because of a shrinking defense budget and political reforms in the Soviet Union and its former satellite countries. But Long Beach politicians and union leaders charged Monday that the process has been tainted by back-room politics.

Critics say the Navy has withheld information about the benefits of keeping existing shipyards open rather than finishing six modern ones under construction. They also argue that the Washington-based closure panel has an East Coast bias and would be more inclined to shut down the Long Beach shipyard than the one in Philadelphia.

“All of the commission members are from the East Coast. Some of them have an interest in East Coast installations. Long Beach is not getting a fair shake,” said an angry Louis Rodriguez, president of one of the shipyard’s largest labor unions.

It would be no contest if the panel were to look solely at numbers, local officials contend. The Long Beach shipyard had a profit of more than $56 million this fiscal year by finishing work early and under budget. By contrast, the Philadelphia yard has operated at a nearly $53-million loss, according to Navy statistics cited by the city.