Base Chief Vows Effort to Keep Arms Jobs in Government Hands

The commander of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and three other West Coast arms depots said he will aggressively work to keep weapons handling under the control of government employees, even as a proposal to seek private bids for the sensitive work moves forward.

Capt. Thomas R. Bernitt said in an interview that the workers who now load and unload Tomahawk missiles, torpedoes and other heavy munitions at the facilities have a proven track record for safety and security that private contractors would be hard-pressed to match.

“The government folks have been doing this particular job on the average of 10 to 15 years per person,” Bernitt said Monday after briefing the Seal Beach City Council on the issue.

The bidding for weapons handling is part of a nationwide plan by the Navy to outsource as many as 80,500 jobs. Pentagon planners say the shift will save $8 billion by 2005.

Government employees will have the chance to prepare their own bid to keep doing the weapons handling, and Bernitt said he will do everything he can to help them win.

Bernitt said the decision to seek private bids was made by his superiors, and the final call on who wins the contract will be made by “someone unbeknownst to me in Washington, D.C.”

Some military analysts and Seal Beach officials fear that less-experienced, lower-paid contract workers might cause safety problems at the base.

“It raises issues of safety and national security,” Councilwoman Patty Campbell said. “We’re not stocking hamburger buns from McDonald’s here. We’re talking about ordnance. You can’t afford to take a chance with this sort of stuff.”

If a private contractor does take over, 405 of the 800 workers at the facilities could lose their jobs, base spokesman Gregg Smith said. If his employees lose the bid, Bernitt said he is prepared to put aside personal feelings and cooperate fully to achieve the base’s mission.

To help the Navy write performance standards for the bid, the Seal Beach base is studying its operations position by position, Smith said. That means some employees are in the position of studying how their own jobs could best be replaced.

“The morale currently at the weapons station within the ordnance department is quite low,” Robert “Gene” Vesely, a weapons mechanic and 15-year employee, told the City Council.

“We’re down to next to nothing now. We’re working with a skeleton crew,” Vesely added later. The Seal Beach base staff has dwindled from nearly 2,000 civilians in 1990 to 430 now.

Bernitt acknowledged that “it’s a very stressful time for someone who . . . dedicated their life to government service with the understanding that was a lifetime commitment on both sides, and is now in the midst of a competitive process that may cost him his job.”