New Navy Plans Would Expand 2 O.C. Air Bases : Military: Options would mean more traffic for Tustin and El Toro, the closure of other Southland facilities.

The Department of the Navy disclosed Friday that it is preparing four alternate base-closing plans involving the El Toro and Tustin Marine Corps air stations in Orange County, including two that would keep those bases open and increase the number of aircraft based there.

Meanwhile, sources at the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission said that at least three Southern California bases--the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, and the Miramar Naval Air Station and North Island Naval Aviation Depot in San Diego County--will almost certainly be added to the list of bases subject to being closed when the final decision is made July 1.

Memos released by the Navy indicated that at least 21 Navy facilities are now being considered for possible addition to the base-closing list.

The new round of studies come at a crucial time in the base-closing process. The commission is scheduled to meet next Friday to decide whether to add more facilities to the list of bases targeted for closing by the Pentagon and made public in March.

The commission’s reconsideration of Miramar’s fate has provided a glimmer of hope to south Orange County residents fighting the closure of El Toro, partly out of fear that a noisier commercial airport will take its place.

But under the scenarios now being studied by the Navy, continued operations at El Toro and Tustin could come at an environmental price for neighbors.

One plan being prepared by the Navy proposes that the 128 helicopters now based at Tustin remain in place, and be joined by 24 helicopters from Kanoehe Bay in Hawaii. The 24 F/A-18 jets at Kanoehe Bay would be combined with the 122 aircraft at El Toro.

Under a second plan, Tustin’s helicopter squadrons could relocate to El Toro, as would Kanoehe Bay’s F/A-18s, more than doubling the number of aircraft now stationed at El Toro. This plan would see Kanoehe Bay’s helicopters transferred to North Island.

Doyle Selden, a spokesman for the Laguna Hills Leisure World retirement community and a leading opponent of the El Toro base closure, said residents would not object to the 24 additional jets from Hawaii.

“But if they try to put 100 helicopters (there), that would be hell,” he said.

A Newport Beach official who has been spearheading the campaign for a commercial airport at El Toro said opponents of Newport’s commercial airport proposal could end up worse off under this second plan.

“The people out there who are supporting El Toro to remain open ought to understand what they are getting themselves into,” Deputy City Manager Kenneth J. Delino said. “The same people who are supporting El Toro . . . and are against the commercial airport are the same people who have complained over the last few years about the military jet noise.”

The two remaining options being developed by the Navy involve keeping Miramar open, closing El Toro and Tustin as planned, and moving their aviation units to other bases.

The Navy originally recommended that the Marines move to Miramar and that Navy jets based there be sent to Lemoore Naval Air Station in Central California.

But the Pentagon’s entire base-closing plan has come under sharp attack, including from El Toro base commanders, who prepared rival cost projections that showed the Navy underestimated the real costs associated with closing El Toro by nearly $1 billion.

A Navy spokeswoman said the new base-closing scenarios it has been forced to prepare this year exceed those of past years, partly because community groups have made more sophisticated arguments before the commission, even if some of their information was inaccurate.

“I think you will see that in the General Accounting Office report and the Navy audit report, the Navy has done a far better job this time around than it did in 1991,” Lt. Cmdr. Mary Copeland said. “The Navy was criticized in 1991 by the General Accounting Office.”

She added that the Navy backs its original recommendations.

“This is not the Navy deciding to re-look at things at all,” she added, but response to questions from the commission.

Commission spokesman Tom Houston said the review is a normal part of the commission’s decision-making process.

“I can appreciate the humming that must be going on out there when you see what the Navy is spinning up and calculating,” Houston said. “That has to send an alarming note through communities that were hoping they may have escaped it. But we have tried, throughout the process, to tell the people we are trying to be as fair as we can be.”

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who released the Navy’s memo on Friday, said the Navy’s additional research probably will lead to more options.

“There’s no reason to think the analysis is going to be artificially limited to the four corners of this memo,” Cox said. He added, however, that the transfer of Tustin’s helicopters to El Toro under any scenario was unlikely.

Cox said that he, Cunningham and Reps. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-Escondido) and Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) are working on an alternative that would save moving costs by keeping both El Toro and Miramar open but move the Tustin helicopters to the El Centro Naval Air Facility.

“If, in the name of closing a base, you are doing nothing more than rebuilding somewhere else, it’s a shell game,” Cox said.

The commission has already targeted 10 major bases in the state for possible closure, including the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County.

While nerve-racking, being voted onto the list at next week’s hearing will not necessarily lead to closure. In a similar process two years ago, the commission added 35 bases to its list but closed none of them.

The panel’s actions will be shaped by testimony commissioners heard during three weeks of regional hearings, including three days in Oakland and San Diego late last month.

State and federal officials from California argued strenuously at those hearings that bases in other states should be added to the list so that the commission could make more detailed comparisons. The flip side of that argument, however, is that more California bases are likely to be added as well.

The Naval Aviation Depot at North Island may be added as the commission ponders questions about the berthing of West Coast nuclear carriers, the source said. Alameda Naval Air Station, which the commission is already weighing for closure, can berth three of the giant nuclear ships. If Alameda is closed, the carriers would have to change their home port to Everett, Wash., or San Diego.

In order to consider West Coast naval shipyard capacity in its entirety, the commission is inclined, said the source, to add the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash., to the list.

The Long Beach facility was added at this stage of the process in 1991 but was left off the final closure list.

Mare Island Naval Shipyard in the Bay Area was on the Pentagon’s closure list released in mid-March.

During the regional hearing in San Diego last month, questions were raised about the feasibility of closing the El Toro air station and shifting its personnel to Miramar.

The Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, ordered closed two years ago by the commission and revived under one scenario the Navy has been asked to devise, has become a thorny legal problem. Commission lawyers are still wrestling with questions over adding a base that has been shut down by a previous commission.

The Naval Station in Everett is almost certain to be added to the list, said the source, as a possible alternative to closing Alameda Naval Air Station.

Defenders of Alameda, led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), argued that closing the Bay Area facility would cost the Navy many times more than the $169 million it says it will save. Dellums and others testified that it will cost nearly $1 billion to outfit the naval base in Everett.

Defenders of McClellan Air Force Base, an air logistics center near Sacramento that is also on the list, have urged that four similar aircraft maintenance depots in Utah, Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia be added to rebut Air Force claims that McClellan rates as the weakest of the five.

The commission may add as many as three of the aircraft maintenance depots, sources indicated.

If the out-of-state bases go on the list, “it would be an accomplishment (for California),” said commission spokesman Houston. But he cautioned that the commissioners add bases “to broaden their context” for the final decision-making later in the summer. The commission will visit any bases added to the list on Friday, Houston said.

To add a base, at least four of the panel’s members must be present, and a majority vote is required.

The commission is not expected to delete any facilities from the list next week. Those decisions will be made during a hearing scheduled for June 26, Houston said.

Most observers of the hearing process regard the California strategy--a mixture of pleading economic hardship and assailing Pentagon decision-making on technical grounds--as having been generally effective.

The commission was bombarded by similar arguments during regional hearings around the country, but California’s infamously anemic economy and particularly spirited defenses of three bases--all in Northern California--have inspired modest optimism over the outcome of this year’s round of closings.

A source in Gov. Pete Wilson’s office who focuses on the base-closing issue hopes “to salvage a couple” of bases and said the state would do “very well” by saving two or three.

The source termed the Alameda Naval Air Station and the Army’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey as “winnable” or “potentially winnable.” McClellan Air Force Base was rated by the aide as “potentially winnable--or delayable.”

Defenders of the Defense Language Institute, housed at the Presidio of Monterey, mounted a persuasive case based largely on the institute’s uniqueness. Witnesses said the institute provides 10% of the nation’s post-secondary foreign language instruction, much of it not offered elsewhere. Contracting out such work to colleges, they said, would take longer and leave students less proficient.

Times staff writer James Bornemeier contributed to this report.