Vote on Maine base may keep hoped-for jobs from Bremerton

WASHINGTON — A base-closing commission today voted to block a Pentagon plan that would have transferred as many as 1,400 civilian workers to the Navy shipyard at Bremerton.

Overruling the Pentagon, the Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted to keep open a shipyard in Maine that military planners wanted to shut down. Closing the Portsmouth shipyard would have brought 1,400 civilian jobs to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton by 2011.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., whose district includes the shipyard, called the commission's decision tough but fair.

"This would have been a nice thing to have, but hey, the commission overwhelmingly decided the secretary of defense has not made a case to close down the second shipyard on the East Coast," Dicks said, referring to the Portsmouth base in Kittery, Maine.

"There's a real strong argument that having two strong shipyards on each coast makes good sense," said Dicks, a member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Washington state - one of the most military-dependent states in the country - has "had a lot of good breaks in the last five years" in terms of adding military jobs and equipment, Dicks said, "so I'm not going to second-guess the commission."

The panel's vote is not the final word on the matter, and a spokesman at the Bremerton base was optimistic.

"I perceive it as the process continuing," said Thomas Danaher, a spokesman for Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, which includes the shipyard.

"I still think we're early in their process and we'll just watch it as it develops," he said.

But Dicks and other officials said the shipyard is unlikely to get 1,400 new workers it had expected.

"I don't see the president overturning this," Dicks said.

In a separate vote, the commission rejected a Pentagon plan to move more than 100 maintenance workers for electronic attack planes from southern Indiana to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

Commissioners said the Pentagon did not convince them that moving the unit from Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center would improve military readiness.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., whose district includes Whidbey Island, shrugged off the news as minor compared to a series of recent developments boosting the Whidbey base.

"At NAS Whidbey the future is so bright you got to wear shades," Larsen said in a statement. "The BRAC Commission's decision will have no impact on the NAS Whidbey's future."

Whidbey Island is the home of the EA-6B Prowler and the new home of the next generation of electronic attack planes, the EA-18G, Larsen said. And the Oak Harbor community will soon welcome an aircraft squadron from Spain that will add about 500 new jobs, he said.

The Navy said last month it will replace its four-seat, 30-year-old Prowler with a variant of the two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet airframe. A total of 57 EA-18G aircraft will replace the current 68-plane inventory, beginning in 2008, the Navy said.

The base-closure panel must send its final proposal to President Bush by Sept. 8. The president can accept the report or order the commission to make changes. Then, if Congress does not reject the report in its entirety, it becomes law.