California Loses Out in Bid for B-2 Maintenance Facility : Aerospace: Up to 400 jobs will go from Palmdale to air base in Oklahoma. Decision reflects state’s weakness in Congress.

In a vivid display of California’s limited clout in Congress, an Oklahoma air base was selected Tuesday over Southern California as the location for most of the work of maintaining the Northrop Grumman B-2 bomber fleet.

As a result, 350 to 400 Northrop jobs now at the Air Force’s Plant 42 in Palmdale, where the bomber is built, will be transferred to Oklahoma’s Tinker Air Force Base by 1998.

The Pentagon decision requires Northrop to locate at Tinker the work force that will support the B-2’s software system, which operates on 16 computers and has more lines of code than the space shuttle. Palmdale, meanwhile, will retain 200 to 300 jobs maintaining the B-2’s plastic composite air frame, according to figures supplied by Northrop.

The decision was announced by Undersecretary of Defense Paul G. Kaminski, who said it will allow the government to eventually take over the work from Northrop and avoid building a $23-million facility in Palmdale.

In deciding to move jobs from California to Oklahoma, however, Kaminski went against at least one internal Pentagon recommendation and Northrop’s advice that both the airframe and software maintenance be located at existing facilities in Palmdale.

“We had hoped that Palmdale would be selected for all B-2 depot support,” Northrop spokesman Tony Cantafio said. “That would have been very positive for the B-2 program work force and for California.”

Defense contractors have long faulted California’s congressional delegation for weak support of programs that affect jobs in the state, and they cited that weakness as one of the reasons they have been leaving the state.

The software and airframe decisions were among six maintenance tasks that were doled out Tuesday by Kaminski, with a total of three going to Oklahoma, one to California, one to Missouri and one dispersed around the country.

A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said her efforts reversed the original Air Force plan to locate all the jobs in Oklahoma. However, Sen. Don Nickels (R-Okla.), who led the Oklahoma fight, asserted that his efforts reversed the original plan to put all the jobs in California.

Nickels, a member of the Republican leadership of the Senate, intervened on behalf of Tinker along with the rest of the eight-member Oklahoma congressional delegation--which “isn’t big enough to fill a bus,” a Nickels spokesman joked. California has 54 members in Congress.

Nickels is chairman of an influential national security task force in the Senate and “has been a big supporter of Tinker through the years,” the spokesman said.

Separately, Kaminski said the Air Force will release about $95 million to maintain the B-2 bomber’s industrial base, funding that was passed by Congress last year. Northrop will get $24.6 million, Boeing $42.7 million and various suppliers $22.1 million.

The Pentagon will also begin a congressionally mandated study of its bomber requirements and costs, which will study three options: sticking to the existing 20 B-2s, buying 20 more B-2s but retiring the B-1 fleet, or buying 20 more B-2s and keeping both B-1s and B-52s. The report is due in April.