El Toro Base Closure Costs Raising Eyebrows : Military: General says savings could be offset by upgrades in San Diego to accommodate O.C. Marines.

The proposed closure of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station is being seriously questioned by local base commanders who are concerned that moving the Marines to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego might be far more expensive than originally anticipated.

A last-minute decision to add El Toro to a list of base closures announced last month surprised local commanders and has prompted additional study to determine the real price of moving the base, said Maj. Gen. P. Drax Williams, head of all Marine air operations on the West Coast.

Instead of producing an “immediate return on investment” for taxpayers, as the Department of Defense stated in its recommendation to close El Toro, Williams said the relocation might be very costly because Miramar would have to be upgraded substantially to accept El Toro planes and helicopters from the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station.

“We are not going to make a stupid decision here,” Williams said. “If, in fact, this is too hard to do or it’s too expensive, or if it’s immoral to dump 4,600 Marine families on the economy in San Diego--these are the questions we have to answer--if these things can’t be solved properly, then El Toro will not close.”

Williams made the remarks about the proposed move during a recent television program taped for Leisure World residents in Laguna Hills. The Times obtained a copy of the videotape from a local group, Coalition for Responsible Airport Solutions, which is opposed to closing El Toro. The coalition’s leadership has described Miramar as a “huge farm with a fixer-upper” on it.

Williams was unavailable Thursday to discuss his remarks. But Capt. Betsy Sweatt, an El Toro spokesperson, acknowledged the general’s appearance on March 23 at Leisure World.

“What he talked about on the tape are the concerns we have always had,” Sweatt said. According to the Marine Corps, Williams has ordered a review of the closure to develop information for the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which will hold hearings April 27 in San Diego.

The commission will make recommendations to the Clinton Administration in July after determining whether the proposed base closures meet Defense Department criteria. Military value and costs are uppermost in the eight requirements that must be met before an installation is shut down.

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said Thursday that even if the Marines can prove that the preliminary decision to relocate El Toro is a bad one, the final determination is no longer in their hands.

“The Pentagon essentially ceded control of the decision by putting the base on the list,” Cox said. “It’s out of the hands of the military. They can provide information to the base closing commission and beg for mercy.”

Despite the concerns about El Toro, the federal General Accounting Office in a report issued Thursday concluded that the overall recommendations and selection process used by the secretary of defense for all base closures and realignments “were generally sound.”

Williams said he and others were stunned last month when El Toro was quickly added to the list of base closures about a week before the recommendations were formally announced.

“Neither El Toro, Miramar, nor anybody in California had anything to do with the decision. When El Toro came out on the list it was as much of a surprise to us as it was to anybody else,” Williams said in the tape.

Initially, he said, the high command decided to move both El Toro and Tustin to Miramar because Miramar is closer to Camp Pendleton and would eliminate the need to spend $582 million to accommodate Tustin’s helicopters at the Marine Corps Air Station at Twentynine Palms.

But after some initial study of the 24,000-acre naval facility, the Marines have begun to question whether the relocation makes sense economically and militarily for the Department of Defense.

“On the surface of it, it’s very sensible because what we are worried about more than anything else is national security,” Williams said on the tape. “But there are problems. We are finding out more and more about the problems. And, by no means, is this a done deal yet.”

The prospect of relocating has raised a host of potentially expensive pitfalls for the Marines from the apparent lack of facilities at Miramar to an acute shortage of on-base housing for personnel.

Just as significant, the Marines might be forced to leave a modern base with about $7 billion worth of facilities, many of which have been upgraded in the last decade.

In contrast, Miramar might require 10 million square feet of new construction to accommodate the air wing from El Toro and the helicopter squadrons from Tustin, which is scheduled to close in 1997.

More space is usually required for the Marines because they have personnel to support both land-based operations overseas as well as carrier-based operations.

The Marines are also trying to assess any particular operational advantages from a move to Miramar. Although the matter is still being researched, high-ranking Marines say that in some ways the bases are similar.

Separated by about 60 miles, El Toro and Miramar are both close to the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, aircraft carriers stationed in San Diego, and gunnery and bombing ranges.

Col. Len Fuchs, who has been heavily involved in the base closure issue as El Toro’s community liaison, said the operational capability at El Toro is about the same as Miramar.

“There would be no real difference in the way we train,” he said. “One of the questions we always ask ourselves at El Toro is, ‘Are we training properly for war?’ In the Gulf War, we brought back all our people and we flew a lot of missions.”

Proponents of turning El Toro into a commercial airport have contended that Miramar will give the Marines a better facility because it has 24,000 acres compared to El Toro’s 4,700. There is less urban encroachment, they say, hence fewer flight restrictions and the base can be easily expanded.

Certainly, Miramar’s size provides room to grow and an enormous buffer between the base and the surrounding community. Nevertheless, the naval air station receives roughly the same number of jet noise complaints a year as El Toro does, and it must address some of the same concerns from local governments about flight paths and times of jet operations.

Military statistics show that Miramar received about 450 noise complaints last year while El Toro received 510. That does not count helicopter noise complaints, something that residents surrounding Miramar have become increasingly concerned about.

Williams and Fuchs said details of the helicopter operations will take several years to work out with the local community and the Federal Aviation Administration because Marine choppers operate under different flight rules than military and commercial jets sharing San Diego’s airspace.

Another major concern is the lack of base housing in San Diego. The Navy already has a shortage of 6,000 housing units for all its facilities in San Diego County. Miramar alone has about 300 housing units.

In contrast, Marine statistics show that El Toro and Tustin have 2,727 housing units, which are used by more than two-thirds of all Marines assigned there.

By relocating to Miramar, the Marines might have to pay out an enormous amount of money in housing allowances so its personnel can afford off-base housing.

“There’s not enough housing in Miramar,” Williams said. “In fact, while Miramar is the biggest base in Southern California in terms of acreage, El Toro is the biggest in terms of facilities. . . . Right now looking at it, it appears that it’s going to be a very tight squeeze to go down there.”

Cox, who is receiving from the Defense Department a better accounting of relocation costs, agreed with the local commanders that the proposal is likely to be more expensive than first anticipated.

The El Toro closing is part of a “musical chairs” realignment that involves several bases, including Camp Pendleton, two facilities in Hawaii, and Lemoore Naval Air Station in Central California to name a few.

For all that the Pentagon is proposing for Southern California, its rationale is limited to a 14-line paragraph in its report. It claims that the plan would save the military $898.5 million and avoid spending $600 million at Twentynine Palms to accommodate the legally mandated closure of Tustin. The savings over a 20-year period would be about $1.3 billion, the Pentagon report concludes.

But Cox said that the estimates are “riddled with errors,” and that the only way the plan can save money is if Congress requires the Pentagon to sell the parcels of land occupied by the Tustin and El Toro bases. Otherwise, he added, “taxpayers are headed for a loss that will top $1 billion.”

* CLOSURE PLAN CRITICIZED: Investigators assail poor choices, miscalculations. A33