wbc-bases-closing:740ped 6-27 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 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.