Local Marine Commanders Digging In on El Toro : Military: Battle over true cost of closure escalates with area congressmen rejoining fray over Navy’s $1-billion-lower estimate. Pentagon stays out of line of fire.

A report by local Marine commanders challenging official cost estimates for closing down El Toro Marine Corps Air Station has apparently become a political hot potato for top Marine commanders in Washington and triggered further congressional review of the Pentagon’s decision to close the base.

Concerned by the almost $1-billion gap between what the Navy first estimated and what local Marine commanders believe are the real costs of moving El Toro’s Marines to Miramar, four Republican congressmen from Orange and San Diego counties have joined forces to press for a more thorough and detailed accounting from the Pentagon.

The Marine headquarters, meanwhile, is trying to stay out of the line of fire.

A spokesman in Washington said this week the El Toro study is being reviewed at Marine headquarters, but there are no plans “at this time” to send the report up the chain of command to the Defense Department.

“Right now, what it boils down to is this: What are the implications of it, and what (top commanders) are going to do with it,” said Marine spokesman Capt. Steve Manuel.

“The (Marine) commandant is certainly not going to go out on his own once the secretary of defense and President have decided to close bases. . . . What happens down the road, nobody knows,” he said.

Manuel also said that Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., the commandant of the Marine Corps, would avoid public comment on the issue, but Mundy believes that new cost estimates would “only become relevant if they are considered in terms of overall Navy aviation base realignment and long-term cost savings.”

Although the report has hit at least a temporary dead end at Marine headquarters, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said it has already served its purpose and reached members of the federal panel that ultimately will decide which bases will close and which will remain open.

The Marines “have done, within their parameters, what we can expect,” said Cox, who has been demanding a more detailed accounting of the El Toro cost estimates from the beginning. “There is now a rich array of data that was not available at first. . . . It’s now up to us to scrub it and polish it.”

In line with Mundy’s concern that cost projections be viewed in the context of all of the West Coast bases that might be affected, Cox and Reps. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-San Diego) and Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado) have teamed up to redetermine the overall costs of redeploying other Marine and Navy operations affected by the proposed closure of El Toro.

The cost studies arranged by local Marine commanders conclude that the Marine move to Miramar would cost $1.27 billion instead of the $340 million estimated by the Navy.

“We have shared the information with the base closure commission and staff,” Cox said. “I think they are very interested in these new numbers.”

While political and business defenders of other military installations have questioned the Pentagon’s budgetary assumptions in drawing up its list of bases targeted for closure, the challenge concerning El Toro was unusual because it came from local Marine commanders.

Details of the El Toro study were released by Cox last week. Among the estimated costs that were absent from the Navy’s projections were $430 million for needed on-base housing units at Miramar, the expense of building a helicopter base for the units from Tustin, and $4.9 million to relocate El Toro’s F/A-18 flight simulator. The Navy trains on an F-16 flight simulator.

Dornan, who had been previously convinced by Marine headquarters that the move to Miramar would be cost effective, has now been pressing top commanders on a daily basis for more details. A spokesman for Dornan said he plans to tour the El Toro base next week.

Before the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission met in San Diego last week, Cunningham had proposed that Miramar’s mission remain unchanged, and that the El Toro Marines be moved to Lemoore Naval Air Station in Central California. Under the Navy’s plan, Miramar’s F-16s are scheduled to be relocated to Lemoore.

While Cunningham is still pursuing the adoption of his plan, spokesman Frank Purcell said the new cost figures have become a “wild card” in the overall picture and need to be studied before final decisions are made.

The competing cost estimates prepared by El Toro also may have created a political problem for top Marine commanders, the Navy and the Pentagon in general, which already is under fire for alleged miscalculations involving several bases.

During three days of base closure commission hearings in California last week, commissioners acknowledged the need to take another look at information regarding several bases after being repeatedly urged by various community groups to view the Pentagon’s recommendations with skepticism.

The El Toro report, made public two days after the hearings ended, lent credibility to the effort of south Orange County residents who fear a commercial airport will replace the base and who argued before the commission that shutting down El Toro will waste taxpayers’ dollars.

Then, following disclosure of the El Toro cost study, subcommittees of the Southern California Assn. of Governments adopted resolutions opposing the closures of El Toro and March Air Force Base in Riverside County, claiming the Navy and Air Force recommendations are “seriously flawed.”

Cox blames the apparent errors on the quick turnaround time the military services were given to prepare the base closure list.

“It has been a hurry-up job,” Cox said. “They did the best job they could in a short period of time. But it turns out there’s more to the story.”