THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 6, 1995 TAG: 9503060045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 140 lines
Go through the new list of 146 military bases that the Pentagon wants to close or reorganize and you can find lots of places where politics might have figured in the decision-making.
There's the naval shipyard at Portsmouth, N.H. Did it survive because the Granite State has the nation's first presidential primary?
And how about Texas? Did Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's presidential ambitions spur Bill Clinton's Defense Department to seek the closure of five Texas bases, more than in any other state?
Robert E. Bayer, the man principally responsible for shaping those decisions, shook his head in gentle disbelief last week at such suggestions. ``We were trying to play this as straight as we could,'' he said. ``All of this stuff is going to be auditable.''
In interviews after the list was released, Bayer and Richard B. Pirie, the Navy's top base-closing official, insisted that sophisticated calculations about the military value of each facility, not its political worth to Clinton or other Democrats, drove the recommendations.
As deputy assistant secretary of defense for installations, Bayer headed a team of analysts that oversaw the work of hundreds of uniformed and civilian officials in each military branch to develop the closure list.
Pirie, an assistant secretary of the Navy, was chairman of a base-evaluation committee that developed Navy proposals in cooperation with Bayer's team.
Bayer said his oversight group had only seven or eight core workers and perhaps four others who pitched in periodically. As he discussed their work last week in his office, his eyes and voice reflected the succession of 20-hour days the group logged as the list took its final form.
The result will be graded, in effect, by the 1995 Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, an independent panel that by July 1 will forward a final hit list of bases to Congress and the president. Federal law requires that the list be accepted or rejected as a package.
Historically, the commission has gone along with about 90 percent of the Pentagon's recommendations, a figure that underscores the critical role Bayer and his small team play in the process.
But ``the vast bulk of analysis . . . is done by the services,'' Bayer said. The hundreds of pages of data developed to support each recommendation couldn't be manipulated, for political or other reasons, by the few political appointees who are part of the process, he suggested.
Their jobs made Bayer, Pirie and a handful of other Pentagon bureaucrats the subjects of courting throughout 1994 by chambers of commerce, mayors, congressmen and consultants intent on keeping their local installations off the target list. Dozens came by to size them up, invite them to tour bases and tout locally commissioned studies of the facilities' importance to the military and local communities.
As the 1993 base-closing commission finished its work, members made a point of warning localities ``to become knowledgeable (about their bases) and get mobilized early,'' Pirie said. ``And they have.''
Bayer said the local representatives ``had their own limited perspective and their own arguments. But setting that aside, those arguments also had some merit and brought up some issues that we might have not heard about otherwise.''
Not surprisingly, the most energetic appeals came from communities that saw their bases as vulnerable in the wake of the 1993 round of base closings. While most concentrated on military value and the dire economic consequences they said base closing would have for their communities, a few tried some new arguments, Bayer said.
In San Antonio, Texas, for example, officials pointed to Kelly Air Force Base's long record of employing Hispanics. ``They looked at the community as a whole and where the Hispanic community fit in economically . . .'' Bayer said, ``and then made a case for how federal employment had been an engine for social mobility for that segment of the population.''
Bayer ultimately decided not to consider that argument, or a similar case that Bayonne, N.J., officials made concerning the employment of African-Americans at a military ocean terminal there. The Bayonne terminal was recommended for closure and an Air Force repair depot at Kelly was proposed for downsizing.
At 53, Bayer is a slight, gray-haired man who probably knows more than anyone else about the complex business of closing military bases. He's been doing the work, off an on, since 1973, when he came to the Pentagon as an Air Force officer assigned to work on base realignments for the Nixon and Ford administrations.
The job was simpler then, he acknowledged. Congress would simply order the Defense Department to close bases and the department would do it.
Both Bayer and Pirie said the independent commission that now makes final decisions, under a scheme Bayer helped devise while working on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the late 1980s, insulates the process from politics and promotes public acceptance of the outcome.
``It's really an ingenious device of Congress to depoliticize the process. And give Congress cover'' when facilities popular with the voters need to come under the knife, Pirie said.
Because the last two commissions have been so successful at keeping the process free of partisanship, the people who came to lobby him this time generally didn't try political appeals, Pirie said.
``It was very much more: `You've got to understand the strategic value of our base' '' he said, ``. . . not that they wouldn't try (political pressure) if they thought it would work.''
Bayer said a few of his visitors initially seemed to think they might influence the process by virtue of friendships with people in the White House. A pair of memos by Clinton chief of staff Leon E. Panetta choked off those attempts, he said.
``The White House understood very early on that this was a Defense Department action . . .'' Bayer said. ``That was immensely helpful to us.'' MEMO: HOW THEY DECIDE
Factors in the decision to close or realign a military installation are
spelled out by the secretary of defense for his analysts and for the
independent commission that is reviewing his recommendations. Here is
what they consider:
MILITARY VALUE
1. Mission requirements and impact on readiness
2. Base's land, facilities and airspace
3. Base's capacity to accommodate future requirements
4. Cost and manpower implications
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
5. How much money will be saved and when
IMPACTS
1. Economic impact on communities
2. Communities' capacity to absorb growth
3. Environmental impact
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
``We were trying to play this as straight as we could,'' said Robert
E. Bayer.
KEYWORDS: BASE CLOSING BASE CLOSURE AND REALIGNMENT COMMISSION by CNB