Top officers’ quarters are their castles

CORAL GABLES, FLA. —  Marine Gen. John F. Kelly works in a fortress-like headquarters near the Miami airport. Starting this fall, he will live in Casa Sur, an elegant home with a pool and gardens on one of the area’s swankiest streets.

The five-bedroom residence, across the street from the famed Biltmore Golf Course, is provided rent-free to Kelly as head of U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in most of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The cost to taxpayers? $160,000 a year, plus $402,000 for renovations and security improvements that are now underway.

Casa Sur is one of hundreds of high-end homes, villas and mansions where senior generals and admirals are billeted, according to a Pentagon report prepared for Congress last month but not publicly released.

Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the Air Force four-star who commands NATO, gets a 15,000-square-foot, 19th century chateau in Belgium. Lt. Gen. Steven A. Hummer, head of Marine Forces Reserve, enjoys a 19th century plantation house in New Orleans listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and their deputies inhabit historic quarters in and around Washington -- all staffed with chefs, drivers, gardeners and security teams.

The perks for top military brass, a Pentagon tradition, are under increasing scrutiny in Congress at a time when budget reductions and the mandatory spending cuts known as the sequester have forced the Pentagon to cut services, close facilities, cancel training and missions, and furlough 680,000 civilian workers.

“There is no good news,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told hundreds of defense workers at Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina on Wednesday after one woman, who was forced to take 11 days without pay, said she had to take a second job to support her children. “It breaks my heart.”

In the annual appropriations bill for military construction approved by a House committee last month, lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for the “excessive cost” of maintaining “large and aging” homes and for the “apparent unwillingness on the part of the [military] services to seek less expensive alternatives.”

All active-duty military personnel and their families receive free housing on bases or allowances to defray the cost of renting or buying in nearby communities. It costs the Pentagon $1.5 billion a year.

Generals and admirals say they need large houses with high security -- as well as cooks and gardeners -- because they often host visiting dignitaries or preside at ceremonial events. Keeping pricey properties makes fiscal sense, they argue, because the Pentagon either already owns them or would waste money finding a suitable rental every time a senior officer is moved to a new command.

Yet changes are underway.

Some senior officers have quarters so expensive they violate the military’s generous rules, according to the 57-page Pentagon report. Three officers assigned to the NATO naval base in Naples, Italy, for example, have homes that exceed allowable expenses for their jobs, the report says.

One of them, the commander of Submarine Group 8, occupies Villa de Lorio, a 6,600-square-foot villa in Naples leased for $172,000 a year. But a Navy policy adopted last year says only officers in “high-risk billets” can have high-cost leases -- and a submarine group commander on the Mediterranean doesn’t qualify.

As a result, the lease will be terminated, the report said, but not until next May, “when the current occupant’s tour is over.” The current Submarine Group 8 commander is Rear Adm. Robert Burke.

Leases also will be canceled next year for Villa Anna, home to the commander of Navy Region Europe, and Villa Maria, residence for the operations director of Allied Joint Force Command.

The Pentagon also will give up Villa Nike, a 12,000-square-foot residence in Naples, because of “water damage, structural concerns and an aging electrical system” that has driven maintenance costs up to $220,000 a year, the report said.

Adm. Bruce W. Clingan, commander of all U.S. naval forces in Europe, will relocate to Villa Capri, a smaller residence nearby, while the Navy decides whether to spend as much as $3 million to renovate Villa Nike.

But that still leaves hundreds of high-priced homes in the Pentagon inventory, many at bases clustered in and around Washington.

At Ft. Myer, on a bluff in Virginia overlooking Washington, a row of stately red-brick Victorians is reserved for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chiefs of staff of the Army and Air Force and other senior officers.

The sequester has forced cancellation of Tuesday swim lessons at the Ft. Myer Officers Club pool, and other base facilities have been closed one day a week. But otherwise the budget cuts have not pinched much yet, base spokeswoman Mary Ann Hodges said.

“We’re a different kind of installation -- more ceremonial,” she said.

The chief of Naval Operations lives in Tingey House, a brick Georgian-style home at the Navy Yard in southeast Washington. The Marine commandant’s recently renovated residence -- at 213 years old, one of the oldest continuously occupied houses in Washington -- is on Capitol Hill, a few blocks from the Capitol.

Generals Row, nine colonnaded Beaux Arts residences for senior Army generals at Ft. Lesley McNair, overlooks the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. Tennis courts and a pool take up part of the parade ground where four conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination were hanged.

To save money, the military has moved to privatize base housing in recent decades. But the services have clung to some of the most desirable real estate for top officers.

The Pentagon study -- which cost taxpayers $320,000 -- examined 32 such homes. It deemed 10 to be the “most advantageous alternative” to other available housing, and described 14 others as “reasonable” choices, though it said the services were evaluating options to further cut costs of the 14.

The Pentagon is “making progress toward reducing” senior officer housing costs, the study concluded. It said the least expensive option -- giving generals and admirals allowances to rent homes -- is not feasible in many cases because of security concerns and the need to install secure communications.

Casa Sur in Coral Gables has been used by the head of Southern Command since shortly after the U.S. command left Panama in 1997 for Miami, after the Panama Canal was handed over to that country’s government.

After the commander at the time moved three times in two years, the city of Coral Gables offered to lease Casa Sur, which it had purchased for $900,000, for use as an official residence.

Last year, the city said it would raise the $4,500 monthly rent, which is below the going rate. Eventually, the military agreed to pay $8,500 a month, and Coral Gables consented to pay for $275,000 in repairs and upgrades. The Pentagon picked up $126,000 more in new security measures, as well as pool maintenance.

Construction workers last week were busy patching stucco around the front door and carrying drywall inside. The finished house will have a professional kitchen, two new bathrooms, a redone master bedroom, blast-resistant windows and a vehicle barrier, according to city records.

Kelly, a former Marine commander in Iraq and top military aide to former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, has lived in a smaller house nearby since he took over Southern Command last year. He is scheduled to move into his new digs in October.

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david.cloud@latimes.com