State Can Survive Impact of Job Cuts, Analysts Say : Economy: Proposed county layoffs and base closures, although a major blow, would not be enough to stall recovery, according to experts.

Plans to close the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, coming only days after massive job cuts were proposed by Los Angeles County, would deliver a major--though not devastating-- blow to California’s struggling economy, analysts said Friday.

The shipyard, with 3,000 jobs, would be shut down under a decision by a federal commission that has been closing military facilities since 1988. If the latest closures are approved, California will have lost more than 200,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, from base closures.

Still, closure of the Long Beach and McClellan facilities should not throw the $850-billion California economy back into recession, even though the state is having trouble emerging from its last downturn in the early 1990s, analysts said.

“The recovery in California is at risk, but this alone won’t reverse it,” said Cynthia Kroll, regional economist at UC Berkeley’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.

In addition, Los Angeles County proposed earlier this week to slash 18,000 jobs, or one out of five county positions, to repair its deficit-ridden budget.

Some state officials had hoped that the cumulative economic pain caused by all of these events might prompt the federal base-closing panel to keep the Long Beach shipyard open, “but obviously it didn’t,” said Ted Gibson, chief economist for the state Department of Finance.

Closing the shipyard is a “serious loss for Los Angeles County and the Long Beach area,” said Robert Kleinhenz, an economist for the Institute of Economic and Environmental Studies at Cal State Fullerton.

But analysts also noted that the latest base closures come on the tail end of huge cuts in California’s aerospace and defense industries, in which more than 300,000 defense-related jobs were lost in the state because of reduced post-Cold War Pentagon spending.

“That process is winding down,” and the base closures’ impact--while significant--”is not as damaging or severe as what the state has already been through,” Gibson said.

Analysts said the state’s ability to weather the defense cuts up to now, and to still start growing again, even modestly, bodes well for withstanding the next closures.

“At least this closure is coming in the Long Beach area at a time when Southern California job growth is picking up again,” Kroll said. The new round of base closures “is not good news, but the advantage California has is that it has a diverse economy, so it’s not as though any of these places are losing their sole economic base.”

They also noted that new uses are being found for some bases already scheduled to close, even if they won’t sustain jobs that pay as well as the bases did. One example: Packard Bell Electronics Inc., a computer company, plans to move from Westlake Village to the Sacramento Army Depot, which is also due to close.

Robert Paulson, head of the aerospace practice in Los Angeles for the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., argued that closing the bases actually helps California’s defense companies because it means the Pentagon will have more cash for buying weapons and other equipment built by those firms.

“The military budget is finite. If we do not let the military cut back on its infrastructure, it won’t have any money to spend on hardware,” he said.

To be sure, none of the analysts downplayed the human suffering if President Clinton endorses the closures as recommended by the Defense Base Closing and Realignment Commission. “If you’re a shipyard worker in Long Beach, this is a disaster,” Paulson said.

Those jobs might not have paid the same wages, for example, as the satellite engineering jobs that have been lost in California, he said, but “these are good, blue-collar jobs with unique skills. Some crafts will be lost in California.”

And those kinds of shipbuilding jobs still pay more than many basic service jobs available these days that pay little more than minimum wage, economists said.

Times staff writer Chris Woodyard in Orange County contributed to this story.