Just Say Goodby to All Those Jobs? : State looks to be clobbered by base closings

The worst fears of the financial doctors who keep close watch on California’s weak economic pulse came to pass Friday when Secretary of Defense Les Aspin announced the Pentagon’s latest round of military base closures. Eight California bases reported to be on the list--including two in Southern California--will get the budget ax over the next three years.

Although California won’t be affected as deeply as originally feared, the cuts are still of major significance for a region mired in recession. And they come in the wake of two other body blows: 1991 base closures in which 18 of the 34 affected facilities were in California and the loss of tens of thousands of aerospace jobs in Southern California.

On the closure list is the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, with 6,300 military and civilian jobs. March Air Force Base in Riverside County will be reduced to a Reserve installation rather than closed; the naval station at San Diego, which will become the Navy’s West Coast hub, will actually be bolstered. But in total, the changes could cost the state more than 60,000 civilian and military jobs.

The short-term ramifications for the state--and the country, which needs a healthy California if the national economy is to prosper--must be taken into account in the next step of this painful if necessary process.

From Aspin’s office, the list of doomed bases will be sent to an independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which may hold public hearings and visit each facility before passing its recommendations along to President Clinton and Congress. The commission’s decision on closings will become law unless the whole list is rejected by Clinton or Congress.

California’s 54-member congressional delegation--most of which united to mitigate the base cuts--had something to do with reversing Aspin’s stand and sparing the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Now the state’s representatives must fight hard to make sure that California gets an appropriately large share of the federal financial help that Clinton has promised to regions losing jobs to defense cuts.

But amid the pain, Californians must not overlook the fact that the base closures are products of a national process. They were recommended by Pentagon planning experts who reflect on the military’s true needs and determine what facilities aren’t vital.

And base closures can be useful in the long term by helping to reduce the federal deficit and freeing up large military tracts for other economically productive uses. For example, civic leaders in the San Joaquin Valley have discussed turning Castle Air Force Base near Merced, which was on the 1991 Pentagon hit list, into an international airport to be used primarily for shipping California produce to Japan.

That kind of creative planning is needed every bit as much as California’s political clout if the state is to tolerate new closures while seeking ways to prosper in the post-Cold War era. Because in the short run, these closings will shake this state from top to bottom. Our quarrel isn’t with the need to shut bases and downsize the defense budget. It’s with the timing--with clobbering recession-sick California with 27 announced base closings in just two years. Isn’t there a better way to do this?