Communities With Bases Join Forces

Hoping to cut the lobbying edge of East Coast bases, supporters of the Point Mugu Naval Weapons Testing Station announced Monday an ambitious new alliance of military facilities that will pursue a greater share of the federal defense budget.

Officials from Ventura County, Lancaster and the small Kern County community of Ridgecrest said that from now on they will work together, instead of in competition, for military contracts.

Over the next few months, they hope to align with military communities in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico as the Southwest Defense Alliance.

“We’d like to make our share of the pie a little bigger in the West. We want to level that [lobbying] field,” said Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn. “But this goes beyond that. We’ve got all this infrastructure here in the West and it’s not being used or it’s underused. Yet, to some extent they are still building it up in the East.”

The Board of Supervisors approved $70,000 last month to help secure Point Mugu’s tenuous position in the shifting terrain of national military appropriations. And Ridgecrest, a community built around the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, has tentatively agreed to spend $35,000 in the same effort. Lancaster is involved because it is the home of Edwards Air Force Base.

Now the group will head into Southwest states with research, development and testing facilities--from White Sands, N.M., to Yuma, Ariz.,--to broaden the coalition’s scope and clout.

Flynn said the current effort is really a continuation of Ventura County’s aggressive push in 1995 to keep open the 8,000-employee Point Mugu base as the Pentagon went through the latest of three rounds of 1990s base closings.

Except that now, the local lobbying group of officials, military contractors and business and community leaders will join with old rivals in arguing to keep all their bases alive, and even prospering.

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“We decided if we were going to really be successful we were going to have to start joining with other military installations like China Lake and stop fighting them,” Flynn said. “So we went up to Ridgecrest last year and met with them and formed a loose alliance. Now we’ve decided that we ought to start gathering commitments from the rest of the Southwest defense complex so we can all work together.”

The Southwest coalition makes sense, he said, because Point Mugu’s principal competitors for Pentagon testing dollars have been Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland.

“If you have bases in the same state fighting one another, it’s very difficult for our U.S. senators to take a position,” Flynn said. “However, it’s not difficult to get them to support a regional effort.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) said the new coalition is on the right track, and their effort to join forces happens at a time California’s congressional delegation is renewing its on-again, off-again efforts to work collectively, regardless of party, for the good of the state.

Gallegly also noted that Point Mugu and China Lake, despite their traditional rivalry, are tied closely under the same command and could prosper together. A $90-million defense contract approved a couple of weeks ago, for example, sent 60% of its work to China Lake and 35% to Point Mugu.

“This alliance proposal is very ambitious,” Gallegly said. “Of course, there are going to be obvious conflicts. From time to time there are going to be some parochial interests that the other parties are going to have to recognize. And if it ever gets to a point where this jeopardizes the principal objective--keeping Mugu open--everyone will take a quick step backward.”

Local members of the new Southwest Defense Alliance include the mayors of four local cities--Jack Tingstrom of Ventura, Manuel Lopez in Oxnard, Anthony Volante of Port Hueneme and Stan Daily of Camarillo. Supervisors Flynn, Frank Schillo and Judy Mikels are also involved.

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Schillo, who is chairman of the new countywide Economic Development Collaborative, said the new alliance will not conflict with the collaborative’s work in support of local military bases.

In fact, Schillo said the new alliance could receive a $300,000 grant from the collaborative, since the nonprofit collaborative is funded by the federal government and cannot lobby Congress.

“The problem has been that the East Coast bases have been getting a lot more because they’re lobbying practically every day in Washington,” Schillo said.