NEWS ANALYSIS : A Losing Battle : Bases Panel Hit the Biggest Target Out There--California

The three-month base closing battle is over and California lost.

All the pleading, all the lobbying, all the cajoling failed to persuade the presidential base closing commission to overturn the Pentagon’s plan to cut military facilities in a state that has feasted on the defense budget for decades.

The toll statewide is estimated at 41,000 jobs, with Northern California losing between 26,000 and 28,000, as the commission voted to shut five major Bay Area naval facilities.

Orange County will lose 8,350 military and civilian jobs, but at least they remain in the state, since they are being moved to the Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego.

One major base was saved, but largely because the panel, almost sheepishly, recognized the heavy pounding it had already inflicted on the Bay Area.

Seven major Navy facilities were ordered closed statewide, including El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County and the San Diego Naval Training Center. March Air Force Base in Riverside County was scaled back to a reserve base, at a loss of 4,000 jobs, and about 2,000 other jobs were lost in a reshuffling of about 20 smaller facilities.

But this was a battle that California had little chance to win. With the base closing decisions placed in the hands of an independent commission--and carefully insulated from politicians--the vast gap between what the military has and what it can afford to keep is painfully obvious. California’s array of bases made an irresistible, and necessary, target.

The closure list goes to President Clinton on Thursday. He can send it to Congress for an up-or-down vote or give it back to the commission for revision.

California’s Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer each sent Clinton letters Monday, urging him to reject the commission report. Feinstein has promised to vote against the package because it hits California too hard.

But the President would have little to gain from spurning the report after it was elaborately vetted in dozens of public hearings across the country, many observers say. Two previous reports were sent to Congress without tinkering and were adopted.

Once on Capitol Hill, the base closing package becomes a money issue--at a time when the motto is to save as much as possible. Even members who lost a base during the process may be inclined to vote for the package. As one aide put it: “It becomes a budget bill, pure and simple.”

A case can be made that California has suffered disproportionately. According to figures from the California Institute, a bipartisan research group backed by private industry, the state had 15% of the country’s military personnel in 1988, before the base closing process began. After the 1988 and 1991 rounds of closures, California had suffered 60% of the net personnel reductions.

To make matters worse, said Tim Ransdell, the institute’s director of policy research, California gets fewer of the jobs back after the military personnel are redistributed around the country. “Nationally, two-thirds of the uprooted jobs came back,” said Ransdell. “But in California, only one-third came back. . . . Unfortunately, I have no explanation for this.”

Of course, the loss of 41,000 jobs is not the whole story. According to figures released by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Office of Planning and Research, various realignments will distribute 13,000 of the jobs to other state bases, leaving a net loss of 28,000 military and civilian jobs.

The biggest individual receiving base, according to state figures, is Lemoore Naval Air Station near Fresno, with an increase of 5,000 personnel. Some of those jobs will be shifted from Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego County, which picks up Marines from the closing of the El Toro base.

San Diego, designated by the Navy as a West Coast megaport, stands to gain substantially through consolidation of commands, even though the training center’s 5,500 jobs were lost. Local officials guess that the city will be 15,000 jobs ahead after the dust settles on the final military realignment decisions.

For the affected communities, the focus shifts to the issue of reclaiming and reusing the doomed bases--a process the Pentagon admits is seriously flawed. In testimony to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission on the eve of its final deliberations, Defense Secretary Les Aspin pleaded with the panel not to overload the system with more closed bases than he had recommended.

“Closing bases has been cumbersome and slow,” Aspin said. Of the 42 major bases approved for closure in 1988 and 1991, only 13 have closed, he said.

The process of closing the bases, once approved by the President and Congress, should take about six years, but it rarely operates that efficiently. In California, with 17 bases closed in the two previous rounds, only George Air Force near Victorville has been shut down, according to the California Institute.

Many bottlenecks lie in the federal bureaucracy designed to help communities bounce back.

The Office of Economic Adjustment, the primary liaison between communities and the Pentagon, has only one employee in California, said California Institute staff researcher Cliff Numark. The office can provide grants for reuse studies, but the approval process can be sluggish, Numark said.

The Economic Development Administration, a branch of the Commerce Department, provides funds for development of former base properties but has only three workers for the entire state.

Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) said the key to rebounding from the base closures is for communities to move forward, now that the bases have been nominated for closure.

“We have to start the rescue attempt in these communities right away. If not, the lawyers will move away, the doctors will move away, the newspapers will close and the Defense Department will board up the base.

“Yes, it was a tremendous hit for California, but now it’s time to scratch our way back to where we were.”

* RELATED STORY, D1