EVERETT – An independent panel charged with trimming the number of military bases in the country voted Wednesday to close an Army Reserve building in Everett.
The closure of the Major Oswald Reserve Center at 1110 Rainier Ave. will cause nary a tear nor a whimper among local politicians and the 80 or so soldiers who train there.
More eyes will be on what the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission does later this week when it considers Air Force base closings and the proposed elimination of an Air National Guard air-defense unit, the only group of its kind in the Northwest.
The north Everett reserve center closure will mean few, if any, losses in personnel.
“It’s not the unit on the block. It’s the building,” said Maj. Hillary Luton, reserve spokeswoman at Fort Lawton in Seattle.
The idea is to close the Everett structure built in the mid-1960s and construct a larger building in the Everett-Marysville area for use by Army and other reserve units.
“The building is outdated. The intent is to provide the soldiers with more facilities to allow them to train properly and to provide a place where they can train with our sister services,” Luton said.
“It’s not a personnel crunch. It’s a relocation,” added Lee Barradale, unit administrator for Detachment 1 of the 671st Engineer Company. The unit deployed to Iraq in 2003 along with a sister group based in Portland, Ore.
The building is named after Maj. David P. Oswald Jr., who was killed in action during World War II.
What state congressional members and the governor’s office are worried about is the potential elimination of a squadron of F-15 Air National Guard fighters based at Portland International Airport.
The Pentagon proposed moving the 15 fighters to bases in Louisiana and New Jersey, prompting an outcry from the Oregon and Washington governors’ offices and a bipartisan attack from the congressional delegations of both states.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said she stood with the governors of both states, saying removal of the air guard units is against the law without the consent of the states.
“These cuts are illegal, and I hope the (commission) recognizes that the Pentagon’s proposal jeopardizes regional security,” Cantwell said.
Lawmakers and Air National Guard officials say moving the fighters – and also refueling tankers from Portland and Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane – would make the Northwest vulnerable to attacks such as those that occurred on the East Coast on Sept. 11, 2001.
While some communities nationwide already have been hit hard by base closures, Washington was spared major losses of military assets.
Both Naval Station Everett and Whidbey Island Naval Air Station escaped when the Defense Department released a potential hit list in May. In fact, the Navy since has announced it will shift an entire squadron of intelligence reconnaissance planes from Spain to Whidbey, and has said the Oak Harbor base will be home later this decade to the new-generation electronic attack planes.
“At NAS Whidbey, the future is so bright you got to wear shades,” said U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Larsen, whose district includes Whidbey Island and Everett, said the base-closing panel’s decision Wednesday not to move 100 maintenance workers from Crane, Ind., to Whidbey won’t tarnish the base’s future.
In Everett, “we framed our arguments that the naval station could be a model for what the military might be in terms of its agility, flexibility, quality of facilities, strategic location and, of course, a deep-water port,” said Pat McClain, Everett’s governmental affairs director.
McClain said city and county arguments were based on the Defense Department’s criteria, “and we believe we rightly reflected that this base is of great value to the Navy in the future.”
Elsewhere in the Northwest, the panel voted to block a Pentagon plan that would have transferred as many as 1,400 civilian workers to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton.
Instead, the commission overruled the Pentagon by voting to keep open a Portsmith, Maine, shipyard that military planners wanted to shut down.
Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., whose district includes the shipyard, called the commission’s decision tough but fair.
The base-closure panel will continue voting this week, and 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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