Long Beach Open House : Educators Seek Property Up for Grabs When Base Closes

A clean-cut sailor passes a lazy afternoon chatting with a neighbor. Mothers return with their children from the neighborhood school to their apartments in the boxy, two-story buildings of the Cabrillo naval housing project, where hundreds of service families live in west Long Beach.

But military life at the housing project is nearing an end. Cabrillo’s 684 apartments are scheduled to close next year, and the U.S. Navy is trying to find a new owner for the property.

Cal State Long Beach officials look at Cabrillo and see a new research and technology park where professors and students collaborate with private scientists, engineers and technicians.

Planners of the Long Beach Unified School District envision a new high school that would be built on another part of Cabrillo and the neighboring Savannah naval housing project, which has about 200 duplexes.

Those are two of the proposals for the property that will be up for grabs when the Navy closes the Long Beach Naval Station, the Naval Hospital and the Cabrillo and Savannah housing projects in 1996.

The Department of Defense is closing the facilities and other military bases around the country to reduce spending in a post-Cold War era.

The Long Beach Naval Shipyard, the one naval facility that will remain in the city, will take over the Naval Station property for its ship repair operation, said William M. Robinson of the Southwestern Division Naval Facilities Engineering Command.

That leaves the Cabrillo and Savannah housing projects and the Naval Hospital.

Defense Department and other federal agencies have the first opportunity to acquire the properties. Then agencies serving the homeless or state and local governments, including school districts, get their shot before the sites are put up for public sale.

The federal government has been accepting applications for several months for the Cabrillo and Savannah properties.

“I would hope we’d be able to make a decision some time this spring,” Robinson said.

So far, most of the local interest has focused on the housing properties in an industrial area just north of Pacific Coast Highway and west of the Long Beach Freeway.

Savannah has about 200 duplexes with two-bedroom units directly north of Cabrillo. The Navy has vacated and fenced off about 70 of the duplexes, and the remainder of the 44-acre housing project will be closed by September, Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. John Snyder said.

Cabrillo’s three- and four-bedroom apartments spread across 90 acres of grassy grounds. Cabrillo, with its playgrounds and a community building, will be closed in September, 1994, Snyder said.

So far, Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach Unified have submitted the only proposals to acquire the housing properties, officials said. If the proposals win approval, all of the naval housing would be razed.

Two agencies have inquired about using the property to house the homeless, but they have not yet submitted proposals, officials said.

Officials at Cal State Long Beach envision a research and technology park that would be built on 60 acres of the Cabrillo housing project.

The facility would be patterned after such facilities as the Stanford Research Park, founded in 1951 by Stanford University.

The plan is to foster cooperative research and training between academia and industry. The companies in the park would benefit from the work of professors and students and campus facilities such as libraries and computers.

In return, the companies would provide training and create perhaps thousands of jobs.

The university would construct research and training buildings on 20 acres, which it hopes the Navy will provide free. It is common for federal agencies to transfer surplus land without charge if it will serve the public good.

The university, possibly in conjunction with Long Beach, would have to buy the other 40 acres. The land would then be leased to private industry, which would put up buildings.

The Navy has not yet appraised the 40 acres, and university and city officials have not determined how they would pay for it, officials said.

The city has not submitted a proposal for the properties. Officials are planning a series of public forums, the last on May 20, to receive community input before the City Council settles on a proposal.

But although there has been no formal endorsement, most city officials appear to support the proposals of the university and the school district.

They see the university’s plan as the best way to recover the jobs and other economic benefits that will be lost with the Naval Station, hospital and housing projects.

The closure will cost Long Beach’s economy an estimated $1 billion a year. At one time, the Naval Station and hospital accounted for about 17,000 military and 1,300 civilians jobs.

“The proposal has a lot of merit,” Mayor Ernie Kell said.

Councilman Warren Harwood is the only council member to publicly oppose the plan. He would like to see the city acquire Cabrillo at no cost and turn it into housing for low-income senior citizens.

Harwood said it would be a crime to tear down Cabrillo’s apartments.

Unable to generate support on the City Council, Harwood says he will organize the city’s senior citizens.

“I think it’s excessive to tear down useful housing,” he said. “We’re going to let every senior citizen in town know. We’re not going to give an inch.”

Harwood supports the plan to build a new high school. But he said the proposal should be scaled back so it does not affect the Cabrillo property.

Nevertheless, Long Beach Unified officials are pressing ahead with their application to obtain Savannah and 30 acres of Cabrillo, a total of 74 acres, to build a 4,000-student high school and, possibly, a junior high.

“All you have to do is go into any of our high schools and see how overcrowded they are,” Supt. Carl A. Cohn said.

The district’s five high schools, and especially Poly High School that serves the Westside, are jammed with students even though new science wings were recently built, Cohn said.

And, school officials say, it would be difficult to find enough land elsewhere for a high school in the highly developed city without condemning private property.

Long Beach Unified hopes that the Navy will exercise its power to transfer the property free to the district.

In the district’s application for the property, Deputy Supt. Tomio Nishimura said Long Beach Unified hopes to receive school construction money from a state bond issue in 1994 or 1996. If not, the district would pay to put portable classrooms on the site.

Disposal of the Naval Hospital is lagging behind that of the two housing projects, Robinson said.

The federal Bureau of Prisons applied to turn the Naval Hospital into a prison hospital, but the proposal was rejected because the corrections agency did not want to compensate the Navy for the full value of the property, he said.

City Manager James C. Hankla said the city is definitely interested in the property, which is in east Long Beach near the San Gabriel River Freeway.

“It’s probably one of the finest retail sites in all of Southern California,” he said.

BACKGROUND

Congress cleared the way in 1991 for the shutdown of 34 domestic military installations, including the Long Beach Naval Station. The action was part of a major reshaping of the U.S. military prompted by the end of the Cold War and the need to reduce spending. The 34 bases are scheduled to close by 1997. As a result, thousands of acres of federal property have been declared surplus and are being offered to other agencies.