Top Civilian Retires From Post at Point Mugu

Taking advantage of the lull in military base closures, Point Mugu’s top civilian retired Friday and handed the reins to another senior executive to run what is essentially a high-tech corporation of 2,500 scientists, engineers and assistants.

Jerry Wrout, 58, said he had planned to retire some time ago but postponed his decision last year when Point Mugu was temporarily added to the list of bases slated for closure.

“I couldn’t retire under those circumstances,” said Wrout, who has worked at the Navy base for 36 1/2 years. “But now is a good time to pass the reins.”

Wrout’s position as top civilian was immediately filled by Steve Mendonca, a senior executive who was the base’s point man shepherding Point Mugu through last year’s round of base closures.

Mendonca, 48, said he is excited about the challenges ahead, such as lining up more work for the base, which has suffered under a shrinking Pentagon budget. But his promotion comes at a bittersweet time, given the departure of his longtime friend and mentor.

“We are losing an extremely smart person with a vast amount of knowledge,” Mendonca said. “He’s been our visionary. It is a sad occasion to see him leave.”

Wrout started working at Point Mugu in 1960, when the base was like a booming oil town, frenetic with activity and thousands of sailors. Now it is more like an aging city: Its streets are fairly quiet, its personnel numbers dramatically reduced.

During his tenure at the base, Wrout was instrumental in bringing the program to test weapons used by the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet to Point Mugu. It remains as one of the base’s mainstay programs.

As top civilian since 1992, Wrout was director of test and evaluation for the Naval Air Warfare Center, overseeing Navy civilian employees and hundreds of workers supplied by defense contractors at Point Mugu, China Lake and another base in White Sands, N.M.

Wrout said it has been personally painful to watch the layoffs and other cutbacks as the Pentagon budget and work force have been shrinking at 4% a year.

But worse, he said, was last year’s run-in with the nation’s base-closing commissioners, who placed Point Mugu on their hit list and then took it off, acknowledging that they had “goofed.”

“It put a community and a group of professionals through a wringer, and for no good end,” Wrout said.

Wrout sees further cutbacks looming as the Pentagon wrestles with various consolidation studies that could require dramatic streamlining of military operations and possibly shuttering more bases.

“The worst thing we can do is kid the work force,” he said. “We are not going to plummet [in employment], but we are going to continue to chip away.”

He said Point Mugu is lucky to have Mendonca as its new civilian leader--a view shared by county Supervisor John K. Flynn.

“Steve has a lot of ability and a lot of enthusiasm,” said Flynn, who has led a community effort to bring more jobs to the county’s Navy bases. “He will be a great bridge between the base and the community.”

The change in civilian leadership coincides with appointment of a new military leader to oversee Point Mugu and its sister Navy base at China Lake, in the upper Mojave Desert.

Last week, Adm.-Select John V. Chenevey relieved Rear Adm. Dana B. McKinney of command at a formal ceremony at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, headquarters in China Lake.

Wrout, a Moorpark resident, said he will join Engineering Management Concepts, a small engineering firm based in Camarillo, as its chief strategic planner. He begins his new job next week.