Missile Work at Seal Beach Base to Get Ax

The Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station will lose a small part of its operations--tactical missile maintenance work--as part of a plan conceived by the federal base closure commission to consolidate work now done by the different military services at bases across the country.

The decision by the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission will lead to the elimination of 25 jobs out of a total base work force of 1,110, according to base officials. The mission would be phased out during the next four to six years.

Commissioner Rebecca G. Cox of California made the motion to consolidate the missile maintenance work performed at nine military bases and seven privately owned facilities, and have it all done at Letterkenny Army Depot in Chambersburg, Pa.

Three California bases--the Alameda Navy Depot, the Marine Corps Logistics Base at Barstow and Seal Beach--are part of the consolidation.

Although the proposal was strongly opposed by local officials, who argued that any consolidation of missile maintenance should be done at Seal Beach, the commission voted unanimously in favor of the proposal. A report to the commission had said that Seal Beach was one of six bases that could accommodate the entire workload.

“We are quite saddened by the commission’s action,” Seal Beach City Manager Jerry L. Bankston said. “I think the data was ignored in favor of retaining an Army depot in Pennsylvania.”

A Seal Beach base spokesman said that two years ago, the Army abandoned a plan to combine the military’s missile maintenance work, after the General Accounting Office found it would not be cost-effective, because the different service branches use different types of tactical missiles requiring different maintenance and parts stockpiles.

“It’s like comparing apples to oranges to plums,” base spokesman Richard Williamson said. “But the commission has acted. The data shows it’s not cost-effective, but the commission has made its decision.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) said that Seal Beach had much to be thankful for in spite of the decision, because it had largely escaped the budget ax forcing closure of dozens of military bases across the nation.

“We can always second-guess these things,” Rohrabacher said. “I am very pleased by the fact that there is no real challenge to Seal Beach’s existence. . . . We have more to be thankful for than to worry about.”

The base was the first of three Orange County facilities whose fates are being considered during five days of commission deliberations ending Sunday. Yet to be voted upon are proposals to close the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and the reaffirmation of a 1990 commission decision to close the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station. Those votes are scheduled for Saturday.

Throughout their deliberations, the commissioners have expressed a collective desire to reduce defense costs by “inter-servicing” some of the tasks performed by all of the military services. While Defense Secretary Les Aspin and top military commanders have supported the concept, the services have resisted efforts to implement such a policy, the commissioners said Thursday.

When it first made public its recommendations in March, the Defense Department proposed scaling back the Letterkenny Army Depot in Chambersburg, Pa., and redistributing the missile maintenance work done there among other bases and contractors. Instead, the commission said Letterkenny is the one facility that should remain open.

The Defense Department estimated the one-time costs of consolidating the operations at just over $39 million--a sum that would be recovered through savings over the next 15 years. But the commission staff concluded the initial cost would amount to no more than $30.5 million, and that savings would offset those costs in just two years.

Commenting on the GAO’s conclusion that consolidating the various services’ maintenance work would not be costeffective, Cox remarked in an interview: “The GAO has been on all sides of (the) inter-servicing (issue). Originally, GAO said this was a very important part of inter-servicing.”

Cox also noted that the cutback at Seal Beach involves only 25 jobs. Of the nine bases where such work was done, Seal Beach had the third smallest number of employees involved in missile maintenance, according to the staff report. But it ranked fourth in terms of labor costs when overhead was included in the calculations.