DATE: Thursday, June 19, 1997               TAG: 9706190380

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A6   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:  103 lines

LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEES HESITATE TO EMBRACE BASE CLOSURES PLAN

Military families and civilian business people around Hampton Roads, who have been holding their breaths over the threat of another round of military base closings, may be able to exhale by the weekend.

Though Defense Secretary William S. Cohen says more closings are vital to the Pentagon's plan to provide more money for new weapons, key committees in both houses of Congress have signaled their opposition to such legislation.

Arguments for and against additional closures figured prominently in a Senate debate Wednesday, and are expected to be heard again there and in the House today as both bodies consider defense spending plans for 1998.

Anti-closing forces are particularly strong in the House, where members serve two-year terms and the pain of a 1999 round of closings, as Cohen has proposed, would be fresh in voters' minds when elections roll around in November 2000.

Base closing advocates are stronger in the Senate, with Virginians John W. Warner and Charles S. Robb prominent among them. But they may be stymied by procedural rules that on Wednesday allowed a pair of senators to block any debate on the entire $268 billion defense budget.

Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Phil Gramm, both R-Texas, say they will keep a hold on the budget plan, blocking the Senate from considering it, until Senate leaders agree to protect operations of aircraft maintenance centers at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio and McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif.

Those facilities, among five Air Force maintenance depots scattered across the country, were ordered shut in 1995. But President Clinton, campaiging hard for a second term, announced that the administration would sidestep the closure order by ``privatizing in place'' both depots, turning them over to private contractors.

Bi-partisan commissions created by Congress ordered the closure or reorganization of hundreds of military bases after hearings in 1988, '91, '93 and '95.

Angered by what they contend is Clinton's effort to politicize the closing process, Republicans and some Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee last week inserted provisions into the 1998 defense spending plan that essentially would keep the Air Force from giving any work to private firms at Kelly and McClellan.

If the administration is allowed to preserve the facilities under private control, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe charged Wednesday, the Pentagon will spend $400 million it could have saved by closing them. Because the military has downsized since the end of the Cold War, the Air Force has only half the maintenance work needed to keep all five depots operating at full capacity.

The base closing process was designed to attack such excesses in the military's infrastructure. Navy Capt. Mike Doubleday, a Pentagon spokesman, noted Tuesday that while the services have cut their forces by 36 percent during the 1990s, base capacity has been reduced by just 21 percent.

The Pentagon estimates that it saves $1.4 billion per year in infrastructure expenses for each round of base closures conducted. That's enough to buy 13 or 14 of the Navy's new F/A-18 ``Super Hornet'' attack jets or roughly 1.5 Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

Hutchison argued Wednesday that the Pentagon plans to conduct a ``public-private competition'' for work at all the depots and should be free to do so. ``We are standing for the integrity of the Department of Defense and for its ability to make decisions without congressional mandates that waste millions of dollars,'' she declared.

Though they are dominating the defense debate in the Senate, base closing issues are not expected to figure prominently in House consideration of the 1998 defense plan. Unless at least one side of Congress adopts closing provisions, the issue will not be before House-Senate conferees who will work out a final, compromise plan this summer.

Today's House debate appears likely to focus instead on an effort by conservative Republicans to keep the B-2 ``stealth'' bomber program alive despite the Air Force's insistence that it needs no more than the 21 B-2s already purchased.

Each bat-winged B-2 costs around $1 billion.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is leading a drive to provide $505 million, $331 million more than the Clinton administration proposed, to purchase B-2 parts. The additional funds could serve as a down payment on up to nine more B-2s that Congress would provide funds for later.

A bi-partisan coalition led by Reps. John Kasich, R-Ohio, and Ron Dellums, D-Calif., is trying to terminate the B-2 program. Similar efforts by the pair failed narrowly in 1995 and '96.

The dispute has implications for Hampton Roads. The money Hunter wants to shift to B-2s is about as much as Reps. Herbert H. Bateman, R-Newport News, and Norman Sisisky, D-Petersburg, are seeking as a down payment on an aircraft carrier the Navy hopes to begin building in Newport News in 2002.

Newport News Shipbuilding says that with a $345 million appropriation next year for the ship, it could save about $600 million on the carrier's final cost. The early spending would allow the yard to purchase some components and keep workers who otherwise would have to be laid off and then rehired, at additional expense.

Hunter also is the most prominent House opponent of a ``teaming'' arrangement the Navy wants to use for construction of a new generation of attack submarines.

Newport News Shipbuilding and Electric Boat of Groton, Conn., have agreed to work together on the subs, ending decades of competition. The yards claim the arrangement will save about $700 million over the first four subs constructed.

Though Hunter insists that the carrier funds and his opposition to ``teaming'' are not tied to the B-2 fight, sources said a link between the issues was discussed in private meetings last week of the House National Security Committee.

Those sources suggested that if B-2 funding is cut off, shipbuilding advocates may find it easier to find supporters for the carrier money and submarine teaming concept.

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