Vigorous Politicking Helped Some Areas Elude the Ax : Survivors: Bay Area leaders applied plenty of arm-bending, and a number of facilities received reprieves.

WASHINGTON —  While it provoked fury in many military towns across the country, the Pentagon’s latest base-closing list was greeted Friday in a few locales as nothing less than salvation--and proof that strenuous politicking can pay off.

Such was the sentiment in Alameda, Calif., where the Alameda Naval Depot and Naval Air Station were spared from the shutdown that has been threatened intermittently for two decades. “We wrote letters, we made phone calls; I went back there (to Washington) five times myself,” said Alameda Mayor Chuck Corica. “Something worked.”

Twenty military bases that the Pentagon had proposed closing a year ago were omitted from the revised hit list released Friday by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Rising from the dead were tank-building plants in Michigan and Ohio, ammunition plants in several states and supply, shipbuilding and medical centers in communities across the land.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the resurrection saved the Oakland Hospital and Oakland Naval Supply Center as well as the two Alameda facilities.

The Alameda depot, one of two deep-water naval ports on the West Coast, is used to overhaul and repair military aircraft, engines and aircraft components. The facility provides docking for up to four aircraft carriers and cruisers.

Alameda Mayor Corica gives much credit for the depot’s removal from the base-closing list to freshman Republican Sen. John Seymour, who met April 3 in San Francisco with Cheney to plead for continued operation of the facilities.

But there has been plenty of political huffing and puffing to go around. Last month, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Oakland) produced what they said was a Navy document showing that Navy officials had ordered subordinates to come up with reasons to close the facilities, no matter what their merits.

The letter had been delivered mysteriously to Stark’s Washington offices. On March 20, a 21-member delegation from Alameda met with Naval Undersecretary J. Daniel Howard at the Pentagon to discuss the letter.

On Friday, Stark acknowledged that he never saw any convincing proof that the letter “was anything other than manufactured.”

Bay Area politicians and community leaders also charged that the Pentagon had targeted their area because they read San Francisco’s barely approved decision to become a home port for the battleship USS Missouri as a sign that the area would not mind losing military facilities. San Franciscans voted narrowly to accept the ship in 1989, although the Navy later decided against the move.

“I just hope the Pentagon realizes San Francisco’s attitudes about things are not necessarily representative of those of the rest of the Bay Area,” said Corica.

Accusations also flew from Democrats that the Pentagon was aiming at the East Bay because of Dellums’ active opposition to the Administration’s defense policies. Yet, “I have to believe in the final analysis they decided on the merits,” said Stark. “The fact is, they need Alameda as a second port here and the cost of replacing it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The depot employs about 4,200 but its boosters have argued that its loss would deprive the local economy of $1.5 billion annually and, when indirect employment is considered, 50,000 jobs.

The Pentagon’s revised hit list also meant continued life for the Army Tank Plant in Lima, Ohio, which has been helped by assiduous lobbying by Midwestern members of Congress, the United Auto Workers and contractor General Dynamics.

The plant employs about 2,500 workers who build the M1-A1 tank and is one of the largest employers in the district of Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio).

Last year, the Pentagon said that it wanted to mothball the factory for five years because its need for the tanks was declining. In the bitter arguments that followed, Cheney criticized Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) for supporting the Lima plant and another tank manufacturing facility in Warren, Mich., solely because of their value as employers.

Oxley and other advocates of the M1-A1 tank say that the plant’s fortunes have been rising for some months. But they were given a real lift by one recent event--the war in the Persian Gulf.

The conflict “proved what we all knew, that it’s the best tank in the world,” said Oxley.

Oxley said that, with the Pentagon’s cost-cutting emphasis, legislators knew the key to saving the plant would be making it seem an economical proposition.

So he said he set about trying to help drum up the foreign sales that would help defray some of the tank’s costs. Oxley called on leaders in Britain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The last time he was in London, a friend “asked if I was there to (sell) the tank,” Oxley said. Last July, the Saudis announced that they would spend $3.2 billion to buy 315 M1-A2 tanks, also built at the plant.