Gregoire rallies for military

Fairchild Air Force Base and the state’s other military facilities should survive the Pentagon’s latest round of closures, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire predicted Thursday.

But the Spokane community should continue its efforts to protect the West Plains base because it may pay a dividend down the road, she said after touring Fairchild and meeting with business leaders. Some bases will close, and those troops and their equipment will have to go somewhere – maybe here.

“Why not have us pick up what they’re doing?” she said.

In her first visit to Spokane as governor, Gregoire also toured the Washington State University Spokane Health Sciences Building and the Fox Theater renovation project, met with the Economic Development Council and spoke at a local Democratic dinner.

She said state government is not being distracted by the Republicans’ challenge to her 129-vote victory over Dino Rossi, but declined to say whether he should drop the lawsuit now that a judge said the law doesn’t allow the kind of revote that Rossi said he wanted.

“It’s up to him what he wants to do,” Gregoire said. “In Olympia, everybody’s at work.”

She criticized the Bush administration for proposing budget cuts to the nuclear waste cleanup at Hanford, and praised the cooperation of state universities that is fueling medical and technology research at the Riverpoint campus.

But her morning tour of Air Force and Washington Air National Guard facilities at Fairchild kept coming up in other appearances. The state will set aside money for communities to make their case to the Pentagon to maintain their bases and Gregoire said she would travel to Washington, D.C., with leaders from communities around the state’s military bases to lobby any recommendations of closure.

“With the strategic nature of Fairchild, we shouldn’t be on the list,” she said. The base, with its tankers, is well-placed for military operations over the Northwest and along the Pacific Rim, she said. It has room to expand because zoning restrictions have kept growth from the nearby towns from encroaching on the base.

Gregoire and state Sen. Lisa Brown of Spokane got a tour of a KC-135 parked on the ground and the governor told the all-female flight crew she’d like to come back and fly with them on a refueling mission.

Washington has one of the highest concentrations of military installations in the country, with McChord Air Force Base and Fort Lewis near Tacoma, carrier bases in Bremerton and Everett and a Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island.

But Gregoire disagreed with the suggestion Washington would likely lose one, because the bases have different missions.

“We’re not in competition,” she said.