Base Closure Panel Gets Divided El Toro Views : Hearings: Factional testimony on Marine base’s ‘limited value’ contrasts with unified pitch for a San Diego facility.

SAN DIEGO —  Winding up three days of public hearings in California, the Defense Base Closing and Realignment Commission on Tuesday heard a unified pitch to keep the Naval Training Center here intact but only splintered support for the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County.

The testimony on El Toro included one faction that urged the commission to close it down. Former Rep. Robert Badham, representing Newport Beach, argued that the land would be better used as a “badly needed” commercial airport.

El Toro had limited military value, Badham said, and “was no longer a good location for a military air base.”

Officials from Newport Beach, who waged a long court battle to impose limits on noise and the number of flights at neighboring John Wayne Airport, attended the hearing armed with charts and data from their own studies and those of outside consultants.

Though their research is preliminary, they said a commercial airport would create more than 50,000 jobs and generate $4.4 billion in economic benefits for the region within 17 years of the Marines’ departure. According to the data, Orange County would stand to gain as many as 22,000 of those jobs and $1.8 billion in spending.

Supporters of keeping the air station open, including members of various city councils and the Orange County Board of Supervisors, as well as citizens from cities surrounding the base, disputed the supposed cost savings of moving the El Toro Marines to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego.

Many criticized the Miramar facility as ill-equipped to handle the influx of personnel and aircraft, including more than 100 helicopters from Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, which was put on the closure list two years ago.

Irvine Councilman William A. (Art) Bloomer, referring to the proposed move from El Toro to Miramar, said, “it’s like going from a modern base to a fixer-upper.”

The Pentagon has estimated that the move, which involves three other facilities, would cost about $898 million, including $340 million for new buildings at Miramar.

But Bloomer, a retired Marine brigadier general who was once a commander at El Toro, contended that the actual cost for the construction would be $720 million to $750 million, which would drive the total up to $1.3 billion and all but erase the anticipated savings of almost $1.4 billion.

Bloomer further argued that there is a dire shortage of military housing in San Diego County, necessitating an additional $30-million to $40-million payout a year so Marines can afford civilian housing.

When questioned by the commissioners, Bloomer could not offer a specific alternative to the proposed closing, except to suggest that the commission reverse its decision on Tustin or send its helicopters to March Air Force Base in San Bernardino County.

Bloomer promised that he would try to provide more specific options during a tour of El Toro today by Commissioner Peter B. Bowman.

Doyle Selden, a spokesman for Leisure World, a Laguna Hills retirement community, also supported keeping the Marine base operating, largely because the community’s residents fear that commercial aircraft flying over their compound will increase noise.

Leisure World residents got a taste of commercial aircraft noise during the Gulf War when 150 commercial jets flew out of the El Toro base.

Badham, however, said the commercial aircraft would actually be a vast improvement over the existing military jet noise, a contention that was met with a wave of groans from his opponents in the audience.

Arguments that Miramar would cause problems for the Marines received some unexpected support at the hearing from the later testimony of Ray Spears, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and an air traffic control specialist who spoke in favor of sticking with an initial plan to move the Tustin Marines to Twentynine Palms.

He told commissioners that mixing helicopters and airplanes in large numbers as proposed for Miramar would raise serious safety issues, considering all the civilian and commercial aviation already in the the area.

Though mixing the operations at one facility can be done, Spears said, it is difficult considering that helicopters and airplanes use different flight rules. Certain conditions, particularly night training or reduced visibility, could provide “the ingredients for unnecessary difficulty and turmoil, if not outright disaster.”

The Orange County presentation was moderated by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who has not yet taken a firm position on the proposed closing of the base. After the El Toro part of the hearing, however, Cox said he would be submitting to the commission at a follow-up hearing in May his own analysis of the cost of shutting down the base.

Cox has questioned some of the Pentagon’s assumptions in its decision to add El Toro to the list of 10 bases to be closed in California.

Similarly, Gov. Pete Wilson told the commission on Tuesday that he would “not comment on whether El Toro or Miramar was the best place for Marine air operations.” But, as he has done with other proposed closings in California, Wilson questioned the Defense Department’s conclusions and said that a more thorough review is necessary for El Toro because local commanders were not consulted.

In contrast to the El Toro situation, Wilson and nine other witnesses, led by three House members from the San Diego area, laid out arguments for keeping the Naval Training Center near the fleet to cut down on disruption to families, who often must uproot their lives to move elsewhere in the country after tours at sea have ended.

In a strategy employed by San Diegans in the last round of base-closure hearings in 1991, a quality-of-life argument was made by a chief petty officer and his wife.

Cathy Kimble, wife of Master Chief Petty Officer Mike Kimble, told the commission of having to pull one daughter out of school 11 times. The younger daughter was “lucky,” Cathy Kimble said, “she only had to change seven times.”

Chief Kimble, in a crisp white uniform, said that enlisted personnel would be more willing to seek advanced training if it were available in the area--and commanders would be more willing to send them. Telling of the toll that frequent relocations took on family life, Kimble urged the commission “to make quality of life paramount in your decision.”

Besieged most often at these hearings by dry statistical testimony, the commission was clearly affected by the human touch conveyed by the Kimbles, prompting one to say, “It’s so refreshing to hear from real people.”

In more conventional testimony, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) delivered a rapid-fire summation of how the San Diego training center was superior to the rival Great Lakes Training Center north of Chicago.

At one point, commissioner Beverly Byron, a former colleague in the House, advised the voluble Hunter to slow down. While emphasizing the benefits of “colocation” of ships and training schools, Hunter cited higher hospital and energy costs at Great Lakes through a series of slides.

Also on the base-closing list is Riverside County’s March Air Force Base. All its active duty personnel are slated to be transferred to Travis AFB in Solano County, leaving a skeletal reserve force at March. As such it is not considered a closure but a realignment. But officials from the area took issue Tuesday with many of the calculations used by the Air Force to conclude that March had the least military value compared to similar bases.

After Tuesday’s hearings, commission chairman James Courter said the panel was “leaning toward” adding more bases to the list slated for closure--a move that could help some bases now targeted be kept open.

Supporters of Northern California bases scheduled for shutdown are lobbying to get the Everett (Wash.) Naval Air Station added in hopes of saving the Alameda Naval Air Station. San Diego benefited when the commission added the Great Lakes Naval Training Center to the Pentagon’s original list.

Staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this story.