DATE: Tuesday, October 7, 1997              TAG: 9710070013

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   55 lines

OCEANA ERROR ZONED OUT MILLIONS WERE SPENT BECAUSE THE NAVY FAILED TO APPLY ITS OWN RULES.

When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, the right hand can get stuck with a bill for $21 million. That's the apparent upshot of a failure by the Navy to communicate fully with the city of Virginia Beach.

Since 1978, two Beach schools - Linkhorn Park and Seatack - have fallen within the accident potential zones of Oceana Naval Air Station. But it didn't become an issue until 1993 when a decision was being made whether to expand, downsize or close Oceana.

To avoid having the location of the schools become a potential deal-breaker, Virginia Beach pronounced itself willing to spend the money to get them out of harm's way. Oceana stayed, and the price tag for moving the schools turned out to be $21 million.

Now, however, reporting by Pilot staff writer John Murphy makes it obvious that the 1978 zones were incorrect as long ago as 1979. That year, the Navy established new criteria for calculating crash zones. In 1988, those rules were updated again. But the Navy never applied those abstract rules to the concrete case of Oceana, never redrew maps, never alerted the local congressional delegation or city officials.

Most unaccountably, even in 1993 when the city was threatened with the loss of Oceana and crash zones became a big deal, no one thought to re-examine the issue and apply the new critieria. The city didn't ask and the Navy didn't tell.

If the exercise had been undertaken, it would have been learned that Linkhorn Park was no longer within the danger zone but that two new schools - Brookwood and Plaza - were. At the minimum, this information would have changed the budget priorities for the city.

The city is slightly culpable for not asking if the 1978 zones were still applicable before basing multimillion-dollar decisions on them. But it undoubtedly assumed the Navy would communicate any such change, particularly since it had become an important issue in 1993.

The real mystery is why the Navy didn't apply its own rules to a base it wanted to keep open and expand. After all, this is a culture in which exhaustive study and assessment is the norm. At a time when the city was making an expensive effort to comply with Navy requirements, it looks a lot like negligence or bureaucratic fumbling that the Navy didn't notice that the city was basing its actions on out-of-date requirements.

Assistant City Manager Bob Matthias says the Navy has learned a painful lesson. But it's the taxpayers of Virginia Beach who have to bear the cost for the Navy's failure to communicate. If the Navy wants to show it feels Virginia Beach's pain, it can pick up the tab for the unnecessary relocation of Linkhorn Park school.

That's unlikely to happen, but it would be nice to suppose the Navy will in the future furnish relevant and updated information to localities making big tax and budget decisions in order to comply with Navy rules. After the money is spent, ``Ooops, sorry'' is insufficient.

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