THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 14, 1995 TAG: 9507140412
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
They were careful not to gloat, to contrast their success with the failures of colleagues from places like California and Texas. But leaders of the long battle to preserve Hampton Roads' military installations could not hide their pleasure Thursday as that effort ended in triumph.
``I'm glad it's over,'' Rep. Owen B. Pickett said shortly after President Clinton approved the recommendations of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. After two weeks of agonizing over the commission's plan, Clinton ``has done the right thing,'' Pickett said.
Unless overturned by Congress before the end of August, a prospect that appeared all but impossible, the commission's decisions will add more than 5,000 jobs to the Hampton Roads economy. Nationwide, the commission recommended eliminating more than 94,000 defense jobs.
The local growth will come at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, which will be the new home to squadrons of Navy F-14 Tomcat fighters and F/A-18 Hornet attack jets from California and Florida. It more than offset the loss of jobs at several installations elsewhere in Virginia.
Hampton Roads already has the nation's heaviest concentration of military facilities.
Virginia Sen. John W. Warner, a Republican who helped write the base closing law in the mid-1980s, praised Clinton's decision but criticized the ``wavering back and forth'' that preceded it.
``Nobody can understand it,'' he said.
Pickett, a Virginia Beach Democrat, was the point man for a coalition of government, business and civic organizations that began two years ago to build a case for the military value of the region's bases and the need to enhance rather than dismantle them.
The group got ``a wake-up call'' when a 1993 base closing commission ordered closure of the Norfolk Naval Aviation Depot and considered shutting both Oceana and Norfolk Naval Shipyard, said Arthur L. Collins, president of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.
In the wake of that closure round, the coalition mobilized dozens of retired military officers who have settled in the area and began an aggressive campaign to lobby the Pentagon's uniformed and civilian leaders about the region's military value.
``It wasn't so much what we did as how we did it,'' Collins said, recalling the group's continuing contacts with military planners. ``We just tried to check all of the numbers'' and to see that the Pentagon's decision-makers ``understood how all the services and all the facets of all the services came together in Hampton Roads.''
KEYWORDS: MILITARY BASES BASE CLOSINGS by CNB