[CPEO-IRF] Collect buckets before the sky falls

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The California Institute for Federal Policy Research issued a report
this month, "California's Past Base Closure Experiences and the 2005
BRAC Round." The report and accompanying tables may be downloaded, as
either HTML or PDF files, from http://www.calinst.org/. 

The report does a good job of tabulating the direct job losses resulting
from the 1988, 1991, 1993  and 1995 rounds of U.S. military base
closure. It finds that in those four rounds California shouldered not
only a disproportionate share of the base closure pain, but a MAJORITY
of the net national Defense Department personnel cuts: 93,546 vs. 80,373
for the rest of the country.

I have two problems with this type of analysis.

First, base closures are as much a consequence of personnel reductions
as a cause of them. For example, the workforce at the Mare Island Naval
Shipyard was steadily declining at the time the base was proposed for
closure in 1993. If the base had not closed, Mare Island would have
become ghost town; its workforce a skeleton crew. Closure created an
opportunity to make up the continuing local economic losses, but the
Navy's slow environmental investigation and cleanup delayed
opportunities for recovery.

Second, reporting Defense employment reductions without a discussion of
the civilian economy in impacted areas creates a misleading portrait.
The San Francisco Bay Area, according to the report, suffered a net job
loss of over 44,000 from the four closure rounds. That was more than 25%
of the net national reduction! Sounds disastrous!

Yet the Bay Area economy, over this period, grew at a remarkable rate.
Fueled by expansion in high-tech sectors, the Bay Area economy grew by
leaps and bounds. Civilian job growth overpowered the Defense job loss
many times over.

That's not to say that there weren't any problems. The unionized
blue-collar workers at Mare Island and other military industrial
facilities, such as the Naval Aviation Depot in Alameda - like their
counterparts in private Defense manufacturing and auto assembly
throughout California - could not easily move to comparable positions in
high-tech or supporting services. 

CPEO, nee CAREER/PRO, was one of the groups that developed programs to
promote healthy transitions for surplus Defense workers. With
retraining, some Defense workers were able to "convert" to construction
and its subsector, remediation. It was important, in that context, to
target assistance to the most impacted workers, not just to complain
about the sheer number of reductions.

In fact, the Bay Area suffered from overemployment. There weren't enough
residential units to house the growing workforce. New arrivals at every
income level ended up living at great distances from centers of
employment, increasing the social and environmental costs of economic
growth. Closing military bases could have provided a safety valve, but
very few homes were built on them for two reasons: 

1) Some communities, such as the Silicon Valley cities of Sunnyvale and
Mountain View, saw more value in preserving employment possibilities at
closing bases. In cooperation with federal agencies, they saw that
Moffett Naval Air Station was converted into a NASA-owned Federal
Airfield, not made available for what the both the market and social
activists considered the highest and best use, housing. 

2) Environmental contamination, at Hunters Point, Moffett Field, and
elsewhere has delayed the construction of new housing. It's difficult
for Pentagon decision-makers to accept the cleanup of military bases to
unrestricted or residential use, but in California that's generally the
greatest need. Closing bases are large enough to allow the construction
of new neighborhoods where people want to live, if the property is
cleaned, not just the infill of small numbers of units in undesirable
locations. Many of those same Pentagon officials figure the inflated Bay
Area housing market, not the polluter, should pay the cost of cleanup.
But such an approach would means abandoning any hope of affordability,
not just for low-income people, but for teachers, nurses, and public
safety officers. Prompt cleanup to livable standards is essential for
communities to redevelop when the military shuts down.

As the Pentagon's 2005 closure proposal approaches, policy-makers need
to stop running around, warning that the sky is falling. Instead, they
should be out collecting buckets. I don't expect politicians to advocate
closure in their communities, districts, and states, but recent history
shows that base closure offers opportunities. Those opportunities
materialize promptly only when good planning, environmental policy, and
workforce retraining efforts are ready when the bases close.


Lenny Siegel

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org
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