Fairchild emerges as issue as job cuts loom

The fate of Fairchild Air Force Base – which was spared from closure last year but named as a likely target for some job cuts last month – is becoming a flashpoint in Eastern Washington’s congressional race.

If incumbent freshman Rep. Cathy McMorris “saved” Fairchild from closure, as a current commercial claims, why is the base losing jobs, her Democratic opponent Peter Goldmark asks in a commercial of his own.

“Slick commercials don’t save jobs and don’t deliver for military families,” the Goldmark commercial says as it flashes a front-page headline about potential cuts at the base.

McMorris’ campaign responded quickly, calling the Goldmark ad false and saying it should be removed.

“The facts are that Cathy saved Fairchild from being closed during the Base Realignment and Closure process,” campaign spokeswoman Jill Strait said in a press release.

A later version of that press release amended the comment to say McMorris “helped save Fairchild,” a recognition, Strait said in a follow-up interview, that many people had a hand in pointing out the importance of the West Plains base.

Suggesting McMorris was solely responsible for “saving” the base would be overstating the situation that involved the community, other members of the congressional delegation and the governor, Strait said.

“I don’t think it’s overreaching to say ‘helped save,’ ” she said, adding that assigning a share of the work to any one person would be difficult.

As part of that effort, McMorris did what Strait described as “sell the Pentagon” on the importance of the base. At the time, a special commission was considering which bases the nation should close as the nation’s military shrinks.

Goldmark said it was a clear case of McMorris not delivering what her commercials claim.

“She is on the air telling voters that she has helped ‘expand’ the base at the same time jobs are being cut,” he said in an e-mail.

The campaign volley over Fairchild underscores the place the military facility holds in the community and the potential danger of making it too political.

Fairchild is the community’s largest single employer, with more than 4,000 military and civilian jobs. It is also a significant source of federal funds being pumped into the local economy, with millions spent on everything from construction to food to fuel. Forward Fairchild, a group of business, political and community leaders, worked for nearly two years to prepare a “defense” of the base against a possible closure.

After she took office in January 2005, McMorris was appointed to the House Armed Services Committee and began meeting with members of Forward Fairchild. In a timeline released by her campaign Monday, McMorris notes her first Pentagon briefing came just two weeks after taking office, and meetings with local leaders and military officials continued through May 2005.

That’s when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, also known as BRAC, announced that Fairchild wasn’t going on the closure list, although there would be some changes for the Air National Guard and some additional buildings on the base to house Army National Guard units. Forward Fairchild thanked McMorris, Gov. Chris Gregoire and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell for their work on the effort to keep the base open.

The Pentagon had said for months leading up to the closure announcements that bases would rise or fall based on tangible data, not political clout. The BRAC commission said Fairchild ranked high in strategic importance. Another plus, Air Force officials said, is the lack of encroachment by homes and businesses, and that its facilities have been modernized over the past two decades.

Most of those improvements came during the tenure of McMorris’ predecessors, Republican Rep. George Nethercutt, who held the seat from 1995-2004, and Democratic Rep. Tom Foley, who held the job for 30 years before Nethercutt and was speaker of the House his last five years in office.

In a tight race in 1994, Nethercutt the challenger was leery of describing any federal contract at Fairchild as “pork,” even though he was campaigning on cutting wasteful spending from the federal budget. Foley was reluctant to claim that his clout had saved Fairchild from a previous BRAC closure list, although an independent ad campaign did make that claim.

“He didn’t like the whole idea” of bringing Fairchild’s closure into the campaign, said former Foley aide Janet Gilpatrick. One reason was to avoid any suggestion that politics was keeping a base open that should be closed. But there was another consideration, she added:

“The fate of Fairchild could rise and fall with very strange things that happened.”

One of those strange things may have happened to McMorris. While her campaign ad was touting her work on the base in late September – flashing words on the screen that she “Saved and Expanded” Fairchild – the Air Force announced it was looking at systemwide cuts. Fairchild officials contacted by Spokane reporters estimated that could mean about 260 jobs at their base by 2009.

That estimate caught McMorris and all other members of the congressional delegation by surprise. She, Murray and Cantwell all wrote letters to the secretary of the Air Force asking for more information, and were told the exact number of cuts for Fairchild or any base hasn’t been decided, but that all bases will be affected. Fairchild officials were “premature” in releasing any estimates before December, Air Force officials told McMorris, and may have been the only base to do so.

The Goldmark campaign quickly produced a commercial that combines questions about Fairchild with ongoing questions about veterans funding. Goldmark said this week that a member of Congress needs to work to keep the base ready for the future.

“A base must be positioned to remain relevant to the changing defense needs of the nation to keep America strong,” he wrote in an e-mail.

A Goldmark spokesman said the Democratic challenger isn’t making any claims that McMorris by herself could stave off systemwide cuts. Her ad is correct when it uses “saved and expanded” in the past tense, Dave Bullock said, but “it’s disingenuous” to continue making that claim with the Air Force looking at new reductions.

The McMorris campaign has called for the Goldmark ad to be removed as misleading. Bullock said it is accurate and will continue to air.