Pentagon Musters Small Army to Aid Areas Hit by Base Closures

For the surrounding community, the closing of a military base is like a death in the family--bringing reactions first of anger and denial, then of grief. And finally, in most cases, there is recovery.

Now, working nearly around the clock out of makeshift offices in downtown Washington, the defense secretary’s Commission on Base Realignment and Closure is preparing to deliver bereavement notices to as many as 50 communities around the nation.

And already the Pentagon is preparing to dispatch a small army of experts to act as grief counselors to affected cities, advising them on how to weather the initial blow and rebuild their local economies in the absence of military payrolls. Pentagon officials will arrive with $1 million in grants and “how-to” pamphlets illustrating the civilian uses to which closed bases have been put in the past.

Under strict secrecy, the congressionally established 12-member commission on base closures has been striving to do what the lawmakers themselves could not--objectively assess, without regard to political pressures, which costly installations the nation no longer needs and then target them for closing.

The panel’s anxiously awaited 100-page report went to the Government Printing Office this week to be prepared for release by a Dec. 31 deadline.

Congress will still have 45 days to block the list--in full or not at all--once it is presented. But most officials believe that the report will mark the beginning of the end for many installations that have hung on for decades despite their declining military importance.

Logging Miles

To select the bases to be closed, commission members and their staff flew thousands of miles, visited dozens of bases, pored over thousands of pages of economic data, conducted several all-night sessions and ate more takeout food than most care to remember.

“I thought I was going to turn into a pepperoni,” said Hayden G. Bryan, the director of the 40-member commission staff, who subsisted for months on a diet of pizza. “I have jet lag, and I haven’t even been anywhere.”

Led by former Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn.) and former Rep. Jack Edwards (R-Ala.), commission members worked under a cloak of secrecy thick enough to insulate them from the entreaties of worried state and local officials and opaque enough to shield their conclusions from the prying eyes of the press.

So sensitive is the commission about protecting itself from political influence that, in an effort to discourage visits from special pleaders, it does not list its name in the lobby of its downtown office building.

When a pair of Oklahoma lawmakers arrived at the commission to hand-deliver 13,000 letters touting the benefits of Vance Air Force Base early this month, they did not get past the elevators.

“We just didn’t think it was appropriate to bring them up to the office,” said Bryan, who greeted Sen. Don Nickles and Rep. Glenn English in the lobby and carried the letters himself from there.

After the commission’s report had been sent to the printers, Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) wrote a letter to Ribicoff and Edwards warning the panel to resist the temptation to close bases only in a few states, thus limiting the pain.

“In the months ahead, I anticipate that the Armed Services committees of both houses will hold extensive hearings on the commission’s findings and methodology as well as the Defense Department’s response to each of the closure and realignment suggestions,” Wilson wrote. As the grueling work of the commission comes to an end, the task of the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment is just beginning.

“We have been through this before,” said Robert M. Rauner, the office’s director. Although no major U.S. base has been closed since 1978, Rauner said his office has helped communities cope with base closures in the early 1960s, after the Korean War, and in the mid-1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam conflict.

During the Reagan Administration, Rauner said, his office has concentrated on the opposite challenge: helping communities plan for the arrival of a new military installation or for an expanded military presence.

Grants Readied

Now, however, Rauner and 16 professional analysts in his office will be disbursing grants of $50,000 to $100,000 to help communities deal with the Pentagon’s retrenchment and to find new, civilian uses for the closed military installations.

“There is going to be a hurt in the community when the military payroll and all that goes with it walks away,” Rauner said. At the same time, he added, the Defense Department wants to get the best price possible for each facility it sells.

“Everybody has the same interests here,” he said--maximizing the value of the property and using it to benefit the community.

Rauner’s office has also created the National Assn. of Installation Developers, a group of entrepreneurs and community leaders who Rauner said had “made lemonade from the lemons” by transforming abandoned bases into successful commercial and community ventures.

In the last 25 years, the Defense Department says, 100 closed bases have been converted successfully to civilian uses, creating almost 50% more civilian jobs than the military ones that were lost. Colleges and vocational technical schools lead the list of new occupants for former bases, and 42 former Defense Department facilities are being used as municipal or general aviation airports.

In Southern California, the early 1970s brought a spate of base closings as the Defense Department moved to shut installations that had once housed Nike air defense missiles in Malibu, Palmdale and Rancho Palos Verdes. Their missile silos are now filled in or used for storage, and the firing sites serve local communities as fire-fighting stations and school and city offices.