Brain Drain : Housing Costs Force Engineers to Leave Secret Navy Projects

Hundreds of civilian engineers working on some of the Navy’s most secret projects at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme have quit their jobs because they could not find affordable housing in Ventura County, military officials said this week.

The military brain drain--escalating almost as fast as the cost of local housing in the last two years--is an increasing concern for officials at both the Pacific Missile Test Center at Point Mugu and the Naval Ship Weapons Systems Engineering Station at Port Hueneme.

The exodus, top Navy officials say, has forced the Navy to dramatically increase its hiring of outside contractors for engineering work and eventually could jeopardize some of the most sensitive projects at both military installations.

In an effort to slow the trend, Navy officials are helping to lead a congressional campaign for an emergency 26% pay raise for all federal workers in Ventura County and are working with area high schools and community colleges to develop a reliable local base of “home-grown” engineers for the future.

But neither an emergency pay raise nor long-range development of local talent is a solution to the problem, according to Navy officials. In their view, the loss of top young engineers is a problem defying an easy answer.

‘Never Occurred Before’

“The new-talent drain here is something that never occurred before,” said George Smith, head of the Electronic Warfare Directorate at the Point Mugu missile center. “We have people coming out of college who spend two or three years here. Then they reach the point where they want to buy their first house, and they realize it can’t be done.

“They come back to us and say they love their jobs here, but they have to move away to a normal community where people can still buy homes,” Smith added. “The result is a talent drain at a very critical level--just when they are ready to produce. It’s a tough problem, and we must find a way to solve it.”

While the mass departure of young engineers is a new phenomenon, Navy officials said it remains only part of an overall housing problem affecting most of the 18,000 military and civilian employees at Point Mugu and the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme.

With median housing prices in Ventura County approaching $250,000, virtually no military or civilian employees recently assigned to the Navy installations command the $80,000 salary needed to qualify as a first-time home buyer. That leaves a rental market with a low vacancy rate of 2% and rents generally higher than many military families can afford.

The result, according to Navy officials, is that some of the 8,000 military personnel assigned to Point Mugu and Port Hueneme for 3-year tours are forced to leave their families behind when they move here. Others with families take substandard housing while they wait for openings in base housing.

10,000 Civilians

Military personnel have little choice except to endure the hardship, Navy officials said. But the housing crunch has produced an increasing turnover rate at all but the highest levels of the 10,000-member civilian work force employed at the two installations.

Charles Moncrief, a human resources officer at Point Mugu, said the annual turnover rate for junior scientists and engineers at the missile center has increased from 6.1% to 18% in the last five years. The turnover rate for clerical personnel increased from 27% to 52% in just the last year.

“It kills you when you get a turnover rate like that,” Moncrief said. “The total annual turnover for all civilians here now was 28% in 1988. It was 18% the year before that and about 14% in the past. What that means is that we are constantly losing people just as they reach the point where they are past the training stage.”

Moncrief said one immediate partial solution to the problem would be a pay raise of about 26% for all federal employees in the area. Moncrief said the pay raise proposal is before Congress, and a smaller proposed wage increase for clerical workers and some other employees is being considered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“We’re optimistic that we can get something approved in the next few months that will increase pay at some grades, but what Congress does with the overall pay-raise proposal is up to Congress,” Moncrief said. “What’s clear is that this problem isn’t going to be going away in the near future.”

Morale Suffers

While the housing problem has produced high turnover among civilian workers, Navy officials said a major concern about military personnel is that Navy families are increasingly being forced to live in crowded conditions in substandard housing that affects both morale and performance on the job.

Cmdr. Ron Lewis, public works officer at Point Mugu, said there are only 568 military family housing units at the missile center and another 315 Navy-owned townhouse units in Camarillo for military families. The waiting period is up to 24 months.

In addition to the 883 military personnel lucky enough to get Navy housing when it becomes available, another 1,000 Navy enlisted men and women live in barracks on the base. Most are single, but some are married and live by themselves because they cannot afford to move their families into Ventura County.

The rental market in Ventura County is particularly hard on enlisted personnel who have been in the Navy only a few years, Lewis said. In many cases, single parents live with small children in one-bedroom apartments that cost more than half their monthly pay. As a result, they often must turn to food stamps and state welfare subsidies to survive.

Rents High

Navy housing allowances in Ventura County--a 3rd class petty officer gets $539 for housing monthly--are the highest in the nation, Lewis said. Still, they do not match soaring rental rates, already at a county average of $625 for a two-bedroom apartment and $850 for three-bedroom apartments, Navy officials said.

“We have a study that shows that only 42% of our requirements for private housing will be satisfied by the year 1992,” Lewis said. “That means that 58% of our personnel won’t be able to afford to live in the area. The problem for the military people is that they will have to, anyway.”

In an effort to reduce the housing problem, officials at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme have asked Congress to fund more Navy housing in Ventura County. They also have joined efforts to persuade cities throughout the county to encourage development of affordable housing. Most recently, they have begun seeking help from private developers.

“We are really just putting that package together now,” Lewis said. “We are trying to get private developers to build 300 units and give them to us on a 20-year lease basis. We will be soliciting proposals in the next three to six months.

“I wouldn’t say I’m negative on it, but I’m not very optimistic,” Lewis added. “Developers have a lot of hurdles in Ventura County to build anything, let alone a housing project that we would be leasing for 20 years. We solicited land that we could build on about a year ago and did not get any response. We realize that all we are is just another interest group.”

Sensitive Projects

Although Navy officials said they regard the housing problems of the military and the overall civilian work force as equally serious, they said the recent wave of resignations by civilian engineers is causing special alarm because of its potential impact on the most sensitive projects at both Navy installations.

At the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme, about half of the Navy’s 5,000 civilian workers are engineers at the Naval Ship Weapons Systems Engineering Station, where the Navy engineers all of its surface ship weapons systems from concept through installation on warships.

While officials at the Pacific Missile Test Center in Point Mugu estimate that 200 engineers are leaving their jobs annually because of the housing crunch, a spokesman at the weapons engineering station said there is no official estimate of how many engineers the Navy is losing at the Port Hueneme facility.

“It is a serious problem,” said Russ Pyle. “Command is very worried about it. You’re OK as long as these guys stay single and live two to three together. But when they get married and start thinking of a family and house, that’s when you run into trouble. They just take off for another area.”

At Point Mugu, the Navy’s major weapons test center, Smith’s concern as head of electronic warfare programs is that the continuing exodus may eventually force the Navy to hire outside engineers to do the super-sensitive testing of missiles and radar equipment that has traditionally been the exclusive domain of the military.

‘World-Class Experts’

Smith stressed that over the years most of the top engineers at the missile center have come up through the civilian ranks instead of being hired from the outside. He said there are about 35 top “technologists” who are internationally recognized as “world-class experts” in missile brain systems and computer software.

“It takes 15 to 25 years to grow people like that,” Smith said. “The majority of our top people came in as kids out of college. The problem we are concerned with now is that we are losing the people who ultimately would replace them. You just can’t hire people at that level from private industry. For one thing, they can’t afford to move here, either, anymore.

“There’s not a center like this anywhere in the country,” Smith added. “We are the final check for industry. They may deliver a new missile here that meets the benchmarks that are set for minimum performance. This is where the Navy goes beyond the envelope. We attempt to jam that sucker with all the jamming we think the Soviets can throw at it. We have to try to defeat it.

“What we don’t want is to reach the stage where we are forced to rely on outside engineers to do that critical testing job for us,” Smith said. “What we have done in recent years is really crank up our outside contracting. . . . The major risk for us is being forced to contract the critical engineering. The Navy wants to hold on to that.”

Relocation Possible

In Smith’s opinion, the danger of relying too much on outside contractors is that Navy standards of performance in weapons systems could gradually be compromised. He said that failure to solve the problem ultimately could lead Pentagon officials to consider moving the missile center to an area where housing is less costly.

Any solution to the brain drain at Point Mugu, Smith said, will have to involve innovative housing subsidies for the young engineers now leaving for higher paying jobs and more affordable housing elsewhere.

“We’ll find a way. We will. We must,” he said. “I think we should do it in close cooperation with the county and other government agencies, because I suspect that other skills bases in Ventura County will also be experiencing the same problem in the future if they aren’t feeling it already.”

Meanwhile, Smith said, the Navy will continue to lose some of its top engineering talent in the coming years. Typical of those leaving, he said, is Brian Bailey, a mechanical engineer working at the missile center since 1983 on aircraft radar-jamming systems.

Bailey, 39, a graduate of Arizona State University, said he was hired by the missile center at a salary of about $22,000 a year and now makes about $40,800 annually. He and his wife could not qualify to buy a house in Ventura County, however, and he has been living in a two-bedroom apartment in Oxnard.

Bailey has been seeking an engineering job in Phoenix, where he can afford a home. His wife already is working there and he plans to join her as soon as possible.

“Housing isn’t the only reason for moving, but it’s probably No. 1 one on the list,” Bailey said. “I’d say it’s probably going to be impossible for the government to do much about the housing situation here. They are going to continue to have difficulty attracting people unless they get them from Washington D.C. or someplace else where the cost of housing is just as high as it is here.”