Decaying Navy Site Holds Bright Future for City

Squirrels bounce unhindered across browning lawns.

Feral cats roam among empty, sagging buildings that date back to World War II. Pelicans and gulls wheel over the desolate 33-acre spit of land next to the Port of Hueneme, informally known for decades as the NCEL site.

Animals have temporarily reclaimed the tract that humans have deserted for the first time in more than half a century.

The more than 500 civilian Navy workers that occupied the 53 aging buildings abruptly packed up and left in just seven days in April. They moved one mile to the north, to a $20-million, state-of-the-art structure on the adjacent Seabee base, and staged an official grand opening Tuesday.

Now the largely vacant parcel, closed as part of the 1993 Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC), awaits transfer this summer to the port and city.

“It looks like a ghost town now,” said Lori Lee, spokeswoman for the engineering center that had called the site home in one guise or another since 1950. Other Navy units used the facility even before then. But the site became obsolete when the NCEL--Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory--merged with another division to create the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center.

Even so, the land won’t go unused for long.

The tiny, 65-acre Port of Hueneme, now operating at capacity, will use some of the land to increase its size by one-quarter. The port will spend up to $20 million to demolish old buildings and build new refrigerated warehouses and other cargo-related infrastructure. Converting the property is expected to take five years or more, but will eventually generate as many as 250 new jobs, said Kam Quarles, port marketing manager.

“We’ve [already] got more customers than we’ve got acres for,” he said.

The city will lease about one-third of the property from the port, creating an aquaculture business park, building a bicycle and pedestrian path and renovating the dilapidated lighthouse that boasts a historic, circa-1897 lens.

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It’s an ambitious, multimillion-dollar plan for a small city with a tiny tax base. But it’s also seen as an unprecedented chance for economic revitalization.

“The city is landlocked,” associate planner Greg Brown said. “We see this as one of the last remaining economic opportunities for the city.”

For now, though, it’s hard to see the future in the decaying base.

Old filing cabinets and office furniture haphazardly litter some buildings. Nameplates of departed workers are still affixed to office doors. Peeling paint attests to the age of the elderly laboratories, where scientists once conducted classified military research.

But Jim Razinha, the base transition coordinator who is steadily working himself out of a job, bristles at the suggestion the Navy has abandoned the site.

“The Navy doesn’t abandon anything,” he said, adding that the final cleanup of building interiors and the grounds is expected to continue for two weeks. “It’s all part of our responsibility to turn over something that’s not a piece of junk.”

The Navy is eager for the land transfer to be successful. Similar base closures elsewhere in the nation have been fraught with costly environmental problems or bickering among public agencies.

Although the possibility remains that the NCEL site will incur similar difficulties--the city has threatened to hold up the transfer if the Navy does not sign an agreement guaranteeing the continuation of a sand replenishment program that maintains the municipal beach--things have so far gone smoothly.

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The Navy announced the conclusion of an $830,000 environmental cleanup on Friday, the first on a BRAC victim in the state. About 2,866 tons of contaminated soil were removed from six sites.

Two naval offices employing about 10 people remain at the site, and probably will until the end of the year.

Also open for business is Ab Lab, a private abalone farm that has leased land from the Navy for about 20 years. The company has long wanted to expand.

“But with the Navy here, it was pretty much impossible to get more space,” company President Michael Machuzak said.

Now the company plans to double the size of its operation, which could lead to the hiring of as many as 20 employees.

If Machuzak is glad to see the Navy gone, some civilian employees have mixed feelings.

The buildings may have been old, inconvenient and chilly in the winter, but many boasted unparalleled ocean views that enabled employees to walk along the beach during their lunch hour. Now, 570 workers are housed in a sparkling, but nondescript, 200,000-square-foot building with typical office cubicles and computerized climate and utility controls.

“It’s better, but I miss my views,” lamented Liz Martinez, a member of the support staff. “In the spring and summer, we would see whales and dolphins jumping.”

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So the old base awaits its final fate--destruction of most of the buildings. That includes the largest, a 70,000-square-foot administration building built during World War II that sports 12-inch-thick walls and is expected to cost $1 million to demolish.

“It was built to last,” Razinha said, surveying his soon-to-be-vanished domain. “It survived everything--except BRAC.”