President to Sign Defense Bill Dooming Jobs at Two AF Bases

President Clinton will sign a $268-billion defense bill, effectively abandoning a promise to save jobs at bases being closed in Sacramento and San Antonio, congressional and administration officials said Friday.

White House officials sent word to Capitol Hill that Clinton had decided to sign the defense measure instead of following through with an earlier veto threat, congressional staffers said.

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed Friday that Clinton would sign the bill.

Clinton is to fly into one of the affected facilities, Sacramento’s McClellan Air Force Base, and is expected to announce his decision in that city today.

With the 1996 election approaching, Clinton proposed to save thousands of jobs at McClellan and at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio by turning them over to the private sector. But lawmakers in states whose military bases stood to gain jobs objected.

At stake are about 5,000 Kelly jobs and 2,300 McClellan jobs.

And the 1998 defense authorization bill Clinton now plans to sign contains language that critics say would hamper private contractors’ ability to compete for the work.

Clinton planned to cushion the blow of announcing his decision by unveiling economic aid packages that will help San Antonio and Sacramento, the senior administration official said.

The bill contains many provisions Clinton favors, including giving him the power to kill the B-2 bomber program and fully funding the joint-strike fighters.

The president, meanwhile, signed a $13.8-billion measure funding the Interior Department and the National Endowment for the Arts on Friday but said he will use his line-item veto power to kill a $10-million transfer of mineral rights from the federal government to the state of Montana.

Clinton called the provision “an unjustified transfer of millions of dollars of mineral rights” that would cause a “dollar drain on the Treasury.”

The proposed mineral-rights transfer was in the bill as a sweetener for a deal to close down Crown Butte Mines’ New World Mine just three miles northeast of Yellowstone National Park. Clinton and environmental groups want to shut the mine to keep it from polluting the park.