PLATFORM : Make Closed Bases Work for Us as the Price of Peace

The other shoe dropped when the commission on military base closures delivered the bad news to California: Peace has a price, and you must pay it. In a state already reeling from defense and aerospace cutbacks, manufacturing job losses, a depressed housing market and deteriorating government services, the commission’s decisions were economically and politically very painful.

What can be done to ease the pain? The soon-to-be-closed bases must become sites for new jobs, industries and housing. But how?

The governor, our two U.S. senators and our 52 members of Congress must work as a team, without partisanship, to have the bases cleaned up of toxic wastes and other pollution, at federal expense, and returned to the stewardship of the people of California.

Transferring these properties to the state, or to local authorities or entrepreneurial groups, would involve a process that is too cumbersome and time-consuming to meet our needs. Instead, the closed bases should be turned over to a new state agency designed to dispose of them quickly to local groups committed to job-creating conversions.

The new agency, composed of state, local and private-sector representatives, would set job targets and have the power to override state and local regulations to ensure fast action. Then the agency would get out of the way. It would have no permanent role, being solely a facilitator.

Even in the best of times, thousands of Californians would face extended unemployment as these bases close. We must get them out of distant federal control and into the hands of people who can put them to good use as quickly as possible--in military parlance, “on the double.”