Base closing commission ends with balm for Charleston and Oakland

[CHARLES DOE]

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- A presidential commission completed five agonizing
days of deciding which U.S. military bases to shut down Sunday, trying
to soften the blow suffered by two ports hardest hit by closings,
Charleston, S.C., and the San Francisco Bay area.
The proposed closings would affect approximately 30 major bases and
dozens of smaller ones. Some bases would be shrunk but remain opened
with smaller workforces. About 125,000 jobs would be lost or moved to
other bases.
The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted to remove
the Oakland Naval Supply Center from the list of installations which
Defense Secretary Les Aspin had nominated for elimination.
And it voted to expand the Naval Electronics Engineering Center at
Charleston by adding to it viable elments of other electronic
laboratories being dismantled elsewhere. The city would also keep its
Naval Hospital, which had been on Aspin's hit list.
Commission Chairman James Courter expressed said he hoped the
Charleston electronics center would continue to acquire additional
activities in the years ahead and become a center of high technology.
Such a move would take advantage of the the city's skilled work force
in such areas and save many thousands of jobs.
But Courter, a former Republican Congressman from New Jersey, clearly
wished he could have done more for those cities on which his commission
had inflicted so much economic pain.
``Mercifully this is the last day of hearings for us all,'' sighed
Courter as he began the final day of 12-hour sessions which had combined
both tedium and high emotion as members often voted to kill institutions
they personally valued.
Most of Sunday's final session was devoted to smaller installations
and activities such as technical laboratories, defense logistic agency
supply control points, Naval hospitals and financial data centers.
Considerable attention was given to defense establishments in
Washington and its suburbs.
During last week's voting, Charleston had lost both a Navy base and
Naval shipyard, promising to end what had been a 200-year association
with that service.
The San Francisco Bay area was also slated to lose a Naval shipyard,
a Naval station, a Naval air station and a Naval aviation depot.
The San Diego area and Florida were also hard hit.
For some communities, there was unexpected good news. The Army's Fort
McClellen, Ala., base, which Aspin had wanted to close, was saved
because it has a chemical warfare training laboratory which would be
almost impossible to duplicate elsewhere because of opposition from
environmentalists.
McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., which Aspin had scheduled to revert to
secondary status, suddenly found itself identified by the commission as
a potential military transport hub for the entire East Coast.
The base commission's final list, which is still being compiled from
a blizzard of separate resolutions voted by its seven commissioners,
must be presented to President Clinton by July 1.
Clinton can send the list back to the commission for re-study just
once. Then he must either accept or reject it as a whole. Congress must
do so as well in a procedure designed to keep the base closure list from
becoming an object of political horsetrading.
``Congress created this commission to achieve something that had
previously been institutionally impossible to achieve,'' Courter told
newsmen after Sunday's adjournment.
``I am satisfied,'' he said, ``I can go to sleep tonight with no
sense of guilt.''
While discussing ways in which the base closing process could be
improved, Courter was asked whether the commission could have used more
time than the almost three months that had been allotted to it.
``No!,'' said several other nearby commission members virtually as
one.