DATE: Friday, September 12, 1997            TAG: 9709120616

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A10  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LANE DeGREGORY, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

N. CAROLINA LEADERS REGROUP TO PLOT RESPONSE

In North Carolina, leaders scrambled Thursday to plot their response to a Navy report that rejected arguments for transferring F/A-18 Hornet squadrons to the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station.

Many of the small communities around Cherry Point have invested millions of dollars gearing up for the jets.

``We'd like to see five squadrons come to Havelock,'' said Havelock City Manager Joe Huffman, whose municipality is home to the Marine base.

When the 1993 report came out recommending that some of the jets move to North Carolina when their base in Florida closes, Huffman said, officials in nearby towns began planning for thousands of additional people.

``We spent $5.8 million in Havelock alone to upgrade our wastewater treatment plant,'' Huffman said. ``Carteret County floated a bond referendum to build a new school to support the additional students we anticipated. They built a new middle school in Craven County, too.''

Of Havelock's 21,000 residents, about half live within the Cherry Point compound.

``If those planes, the pilots and their families move to Virginia Beach instead of North Carolina,'' Huffman said, ``we'll have a lot of wastewater capacity around here without any additional people to need it. We're ready to house those jets.''

The area has formed a 21-member organization, named Allies in Defense of Cherry Point, to fight for the Hornets,

Comprised of commissioners from nearby counties, managers of surrounding cities and business executives in the New Bern/Havelock/Newport areas, the group has been working with the governor's office to convince the military not to relocate all of the squadrons from Florida to Virginia Beach.

``We'll do everything we possibly can to at least get some of those jets in North Carolina,'' said Steve Hicks, president of the New Bern Chamber of Commerce. ``We're not saying we should get them all. But we very much would like to see some of those aircraft come to Cherry Point so we could keep a strong military presence in North Carolina.''

In 1993 the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended that Cherry Point get at least some of the jets.

But two years later, another base closure panel decided to send all the planes to Oceana.

North Carolina officials have been fighting since.

``There'll be an extreme impact on the Norfolk area - which already is congested - if all those planes get based up there,'' said Hicks.``We can handle at least some of them without making as much of an environmental impact on Virginia.

``There'll be some impact wherever they go - so why not split up the squadrons and the impacts on the environment?''

Hicks and others had not seen the full Navy report but criticized the executive summary.

``It's full of holes,'' Hicks said. ``We hope our representatives in Congress will be able to show that there's a lot of things that aren't correct in that report.''

U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., who has objected to basing all of the planes in Virginia Beach, was unavailable for comment Thursday.

Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station spokesmen said they had been directed not to comment on the move.

David Jones, who represents North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt in his eastern office, said he will talk to state and federal officials after he sees the final, 5-inch-thick report - which is expected to be read into the federal register Sept. 19.

The executive summary, however, contained some data that surprised Jones.

``In 1995, they said it would cost $28 million to move those aircraft to Virginia. Now, they're saying $250 million,'' Jones said. ``We deserve an explanation for that figure change.''

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