Lingering Death of an Air Base Stalls Recovery

BEEVILLE, Tex. —  When the Pentagon proposed closing nearby Chase Field Naval Air Station in 1990, residents of this tidy community of 15,000 launched a futile fight to save the base and its 2,000 military and civilian jobs.

But today, Bee County residents are fighting another battle--this time to get the Navy to leave Chase Field and turn it over for local use.

Having resigned themselves to the shutdown of the air station, the community’s leaders laid plans and recruited tenants for a combination commercial industrial park and prison site they believe will yield far more jobs and dollars than the Navy facility ever did.

Yet like many communities are finding across the country, the biggest challenge in the base-closing nightmare is not necessarily seeing the local base shut down. It’s getting the government to turn over the property so the community can put its recovery plan into action quickly enough to reduce the economic impact of the closure.

In Beeville, the Pentagon’s obligation to first offer the parcel to other federal agencies was expected to take only a few months to fulfill. It wound up occupying most of a year.

Efforts to obtain an “interim” lease to enable commercial tenants to use portions of the base pending final disposition ran into difficulties that added months to the transfer process. And new legislation concerning the Pentagon’s liability for environmental damage has slowed the process even more.

As a result, the Chase Field project already has lost three prospective tenants, with an estimated 100 to 300 new jobs, and Brad Arvin, executive director of the Beeville/Bee County Redevelopment Council, said other potential employers are getting edgy as well.

The base officially closed Feb. 17, leaving only a civil engineering unit to supervise the environmental cleanup. But officials say Bee County is not likely to be able to take over the facility entirely until sometime this summer or fall.

Experts say what happened in this South Texas county is not unique.

In Alexandria, La., local officials have run into similar delays in the effort to shut down England Air Force Base, a Cold War-era tactical fighter installation, and convert it into an industrial park. In New Hampshire, Pease Air Force Base, once a home for Strategic Air Command bombers, still is in transition four years after it received its shutdown order.

Pentagon officials say that out of 54 U.S. military installations ordered shut during the 1988 and 1991 rounds of base closings, only five--including Beeville, Alexandria and Pease--have even formally ceased operations. Conversion efforts are going slowly at best.

The Pentagon cites some good reasons for the deliberate pace. Once a base shutdown has been ordered, officials need time to relocate military personnel and aircraft, to complete the required procedures and legal agreements, and to perform the environmental cleanup, said Paul Dempsey, director of the Defense Department’s office of economic adjustment. The office consistently receives high marks from local officials in helping with conversion efforts.

The first round of base closings were to occur “over a 60-month time frame,” Dempsey said. For bases in Beeville’s category, that technically leaves three more years to go.

But Keith Cunningham, an analyst at Business Executives for National Security, a Washington research group, argues that with the rapidly declining military budget and the increased number of base closures, unless the federal government finds ways to speed up the process, the base-closing effort could end up jeopardizing job-creation opportunities and wreaking havoc politically, both for local communities and the Pentagon.

“There have got to be some reforms,” he said, “and the sooner that they’re put into place, the better.”

Cunningham wants the White House to create a high-level umbrella agency so local communities could deal with a single authority for all issues involving base closings and for the Defense Department to shorten the time for offering a base to other federal agencies. He also would like to see the Pentagon speed up the pace for granting interim leases and for Congress to repeal the 1992 legislation that has made the Defense Department so skittish about incurring added liability over previous environmental damage.

In addition, Cunningham wants the military to ride herd on their personnel to avoid any attempts by local commanders that might hamper the closure. Although all sides agree that Chase’s base commander cooperated fully, Cunningham said his organization’s studies suggest some local commanders may have sought to impede the closure process because they are loathe to give up turf.

What happened in Beeville is an example of some of the problems. The plan submitted by the redevelopment council calls essentially for splitting the abandoned base into two parts. The airstrips and hangars would be used by aviation service companies and light manufacturing. The rest of the base, from living quarters to baseball diamonds, would be reserved for a state prison compound.

But the unexpectedly long delay threw a wrench into both efforts. Aeroejecutivo S.A., a Mexican-owned airline, had flown four Boeing 727 jetliners to Chase Field with plans to set up a repair facility under an interim lease. But the company eventually pulled up stakes and canceled its commitment, which would have brought 100 to 300 jobs to the Beeville area.

The prison complex didn’t get permission to use 394 base housing units it sought until February, causing jitters in the state corrections department.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Dan A. Reidenbach, the officer in charge of the tiny unit left behind to shepherd the transfer of the property to civilian authorities, argues that the military has been moving as quickly as it can under existing regulations. The Pentagon, the Environmental Protection Agency and a plethora of federal and state agencies all have specific laws and mandates that must be followed.

“We have expedited that process to the max,” Reidenbach contends. But even Reidenbach ran into some snags that went beyond what he had expected:

* Environmental approval of the base water wells was held up for weeks because Reidenbach was unable to find any document showing what the water contamination levels were in 1942, the year that the wells were dug.

* As a result of new legislation that increases the Pentagon’s liability for pollution caused by civilian firms, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Donald J. Atwood insisted on personally approving each interim lease the Pentagon granted. Within weeks, the backlog had reached sizable proportions.

* At several points in the process, Reidenbach encountered Catch-22s that left him unable to continue until an apparent conflict was resolved. One example: He couldn’t perform a required environmental impact survey for a particular parcel of land until local authorities could tell him how it ultimately would be used. Yet, the community often couldn’t fully answer that question until the parcel finally was deeded over.

* Reidenbach’s unit is so small that it frequently has had to put aside its work on one set of problems in order to tackle a second set that seemed to be more urgent. “We’d go to the community and say: ‘Now which do you want us to do first, this or that?’ ” Reidenbach recalls. “As a result, a lot of the testing had to be delayed.”

Arvin still is confident that Beeville eventually will be able to attract more jobs--and a bigger payroll--than Chase Field provided when it still was a Navy base.

Other local officials share that view. “Ultimately, it’s going to work for us,” said Robert Ferguson, a retired Navy captain and Beeville resident who has been helping to lead the local effort.

But there’s little doubt that the delays have made the transition more painful. Although Washington has provided a $1.8-million grant to help retrain dislocated workers, the money is likely to run out before the new jobs are firmly established.

The unemployment rate in Bee County has soared to 12.9%--the highest since the oil price crash of the mid-1980s--and Wil Galloway, the redevelopment council’s chairman, said some stores have closed and others have put off plans to expand, partly because of pessimism over the area’s prospects.

The project has lost some substantial job opportunities. “The demand is there,” asserts Beeville Bee-Picayune Publisher Fred C. Latcham Jr. “If we could have had access to those hangars early last spring, we could have filled them five times over.”

It isn’t clear yet how far the White House and Congress will go to deal with the kind of delays that Beeville has encountered. Although the “one-stop” umbrella agency has been talked about, it was not in the defense conversion program that the President outlined earlier this year.

What changes Congress may make this year remain to be seen. A joint resolution passed in 1992 calls on the Defense Department to expedite the base-closing process, but it also adds the contractors’ liability provision that delays the procedure even further. Cunningham’s organization is lobbying the House and Senate armed services committees to pass clarifying legislation.

As the saga continues, Arvin is spending at least part of his day admonishing other communities facing base closings to resign themselves to the closure and get started pushing for a quick and final shutdown.

“Having your base close may be the end of an era, but it’s not the end of the story. We’re confident that we’re going to recover far more rapidly than anyone thought--if we could just get them to turn over the land.”