Air Force Calls for Panel to Mothball Point Mugu Navy Facility

Just when the threat to local Navy bases seemed over, local officials have learned that the Air Force is lobbying to shut down the Point Mugu base and transfer its missile-testing operations and 9,000 jobs to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

A contingent of Air Force officials met with the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission staff April 15 to propose taking over all research and testing of Navy aircraft and air-launched weapons, local officials and lobbyists said.

“The threat is there, and it has been issued by the Air Force,” Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn said. “My gut feeling is that this is going to go away because there isn’t time to do all the homework. . . . But we still have to take any threat seriously.”

In a special briefing to the base-closing commission’s staff, the Air Force group, led by Dan Stewart, the Eglin Air Force Base technical director, suggested that commissioners move the Navy’s weapons-test work from Point Mugu and its sister base in China Lake to the Air Force base on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Air Force officials also suggested transferring aircraft testing now done at Patuxent, Md., to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

Although these scenarios were considered by Pentagon officials, Defense Secretary William Perry did not recommend any interservice consolidations when he sent his suggested list of base closures to the independent commission in February.

The eight-member commission is now weighing those recommendations and has set a deadline of May 10 for adding bases to the list for closer scrutiny. The commission’s final list of closures must be sent to President Clinton by July 1.

In previous rounds, the commissioners have not strayed far from the Pentagon’s recommendations.

But this time, congressional auditors have sharply criticized the Defense Department for failing to get the Army, Air Force and Navy to work together and propose interservice consolidation of bases that do similar testing work.

An audit by the General Accounting Office carries significant weight because it is part of the lengthy, multi-step process set up by Congress to close bases considered no longer affordable in the post Cold War era.

The commission is considering whether it should follow the auditors’ suggestion and order the military services to complete a cost analysis of combining weapons- and aircraft-testing functions.

The commissioners held a hearing in Washington this week to consider a variety of scenarios for such interservice mergers. They included transferring the weapons-testing work from Point Mugu and China Lake to Eglin Air Force Base or sending all work from Eglin and Point Mugu to China Lake.

Eglin Air Force Base officials were unavailable for comment late Friday.

The commission staff has given mixed signals on the matter to Lynn Jacquez, a Washington-based lobbyist working for a Ventura County task force set up to defend local Navy installations, Flynn said.

“It’s hard to read this one,” said Flynn, a task force leader. “Some of the commission staff see a potential threat to Mugu. So we have to take it seriously.”

Others say that the deadline may be approaching too fast to compile the kind of information needed to make such a watershed decision--the first consolidation of Navy and Air Force bases.

The commission staff has yet to ask for cost information from the bases, though it has been planning to do so for several weeks.

“If I had to guess, I would guess that this will fall out as too big to undertake at this point,” said Jack Connell, executive director of a lobbying group supporting the China Lake Navy base.

Connell said his group is not pushing the concept of combining Point Mugu and China Lake, although he believes it makes sense to move some of Point Mugu’s engineering functions to China Lake.

For the most part, Connell said, he is flabbergasted that the Air Force would make a last-minute pitch to take over Navy weapons testing after Pentagon leaders had rejected such interservice consolidation.

“It’s almost surreal after the secretary of defense decides against cross-servicing scenario that one of the services would come in and contradict it,” he said. “It seems to be almost insubordination.”