Base panel to vote next week on final recommendations

WASHINGTON – A panel that has spent the summer reviewing Pentagon proposals to close or restructure dozens of U.S. military bases starts voting on its recommendations next week – determining which military communities will lose or gain thousands of jobs.

The nine retired military officials, politicians and Cabinet officials on the Base Realignment and Closure Commission have scheduled four days to sift through hundreds of proposals. The deliberations and voting are public; they’ll be broadcast on C-SPAN2.

The commission must send its recommendations by Sept. 8 to President Bush, who can reject or accept the entire list or send it back to the panel for one more round of changes.

The panel Bush appointed in April enters this critical phase of its work with many commissioners still undecided on many of the major proposals.

“I would not want to be betting on some of these recommendations right now,” said commissioner Samuel Skinner, former chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush. “This commission is still listening and weighing information, and we’ll do that right up to the end.”

The Pentagon is doing this round of base closures – the fifth since 1988 – to save an estimated $50 billion and restructure the military to better fight terrorism and modern wars.

Among the biggest proposed closures are: the New London Submarine Base in Connecticut, which would lose 8,460 military, civilian and contractor jobs; Fort Monmouth, N.J., (5,272); the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Maine (4,510); Fort McPherson in Georgia (4,141), and Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota (3,852).

One of the most controversial proposals is an Air Force plan to consolidate its Air National Guard planes into larger regional squadrons. Twenty-nine units would be stripped of all their planes, leaving five states with none: Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Nevada and North Dakota.

During three months of hearings, commissioners heard impassioned and well-crafted arguments to save local installations. Some base advocates claimed that closing their base would compromise national security. Others argued that the Pentagon incorrectly calculated how much it would cost to close a base and how much money would be saved.

Some of the inaccurate cost-saving estimates may be considerable, and they may figure in the final voting, commissioners have said. A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office of the costs of closing the New London Submarine Base, for example, found the Navy’s estimated savings of $1.6 billion was $400 million too high.