Just four days ago, the Pentagon not only spared the Great Lakes Naval Training Center from its budget-cutting knife, but it bestowed on the North Chicago installation its largest peacetime expansion.
But political and business leaders in Florida and California, which would see their Navy training centers closed and moved to Great Lakes, already are sharpening their arguments.
Their common target is Great Lakes.
And many of those officials are raising one simple question: Why would the Navy’s major recruit training center be more than 1,000 miles from an ocean?
“It all strikes us as very odd,” said Regan Wright, head of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, a leader of the anti-closure effort there. “Why would you want to train on a lake? We’re talking about the United States Navy. That’s just got everybody shaking their heads here.”
Wright and other leaders from San Diego and Orlando said Monday they already are preparing to raise that question and many others over the next three months as the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission conducts hearings on the base closings announced by the Pentagon Friday.
The commission may change the Pentagon’s list before it goes to President Clinton and Congress. And with the stakes so high, the lobbying will be intense.
History shows that lobbying can have an impact on the commission’s decision. Two years ago, for instance, Orlando effectively lobbied its naval station off the military’s first closure list.
For that reason, Illinois and Lake County officials are gearing up for the barrage.
“I’m sure they will have a very sophisticated presentation, showing that the sun rises and falls on Orlando or San Diego,” said U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.). “It will be an assault on Great Lakes.”
But even as Simon and other Illinois leaders prepare to rally around Great Lakes, politicians were less than unified Monday in the approach they will take over the proposed closures of the Air Force Reserve base at O’Hare International Airport and the Glenview Naval Air Station.
Suburban officials said Monday they fear the proposed transfer of the Air Force Reserve Station from O’Hare to Rockford would clear the way for runway expansion at the airport, even though Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has promised that will not happen.
“The situation could be terminally grim,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.). “One must take with a grain of salt these pledges that this space will not be used for more runways.”
Daley said he wants to use the site not for a runway, but for commercial development.
Although there has not been an official resolution by the Suburban O’Hare Commission, a coalition of communities around the airport, board members were resolute Monday in their opposition to the proposed O’Hare base closure.
The suburbs are not willing to take Daley’s promise to the bank, one commission member said.
“It’s been well-known for many years that the city wants another runway there,” said Chuck Zettek, mayor of Elk Grove Village and vice chairman of the commission. “I don’t have any reason to doubt (Daley’s) integrity. He may not want it today. But when it opens up, it might be very tempting.”
Hyde said he will confer with local leaders to build the local case, and then testify before the base closure commission.
But if Hyde knows what his strategy will be before the base closure commission, Glenview Mayor James Smirles doesn’t.
Some Glenview leaders believe their community might benefit if the base does close, leaving behind a golf course and prime North Shore property.
The village’s long-term plan calls for neighborhoods and some commercial uses, Smirles said. The Village Board will weigh the drawbacks of losing the base, which brings some 2,000 active reservists to the town, against the benefits of a new residential community, he said.
“What we could be doing is forming a complete new community with a population of 11,000 to 15,000,” Smirles said. “You’re talking one Winnetka. This is a big decision.”
But the unquestioned winners in the Pentagon’s base realignment were Great Lakes and the financially ailing North Chicago.
Under the Defense Department’s plan, the Navy training centers in San Diego and Orlando would be shuttered, shifting 9,000 military and civilian jobs to the sprawling Lake County base.
Officials in San Diego and Orlando said they will specifically fight the Great Lakes decision, with one congressman suggesting the Department of Defense’s decision was a political one.
Cries of foul, particularly that Defense Secretary Les Aspin of Kenosha, Wis., played favorites by saving the Navy base in his back yard, are expected to be aired in arguments before the base closure commission.
U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) said he suspects that politics were involved in the Great Lakes decision.
“We haven’t conceded anything,” McCollum said. “We have to wonder why analysts keep finding ways to recommend us for closure.”
Illinois and Lake County leaders dismissed the charge, but conceded that the point will be one of many made jointly by Florida and California leaders.
State Rep. Robert Churchill, assistant Republican leader in the Illinois House and a Lake Villa resident, said he has called on fellow Republican Gov. Jim Edgar to get state government in the fight for Great Lakes.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that if Orlando and San Diego bind together, point the finger and say, `Close Great Lakes,’ then that’s how they save themselves,” Churchill said.
An Edgar spokesman said Monday the governor’s staff is appealing to Midwestern governors to join the fight. He also may issue a governor’s proclamation on behalf of Great Lakes.
The Department of Commerce and Community Affairs has lent a full-time staff member to help put together the Great Lakes presentation, said director Jan Grayson.
Meanwhile, Lake County activists said they will begin working this week to build that local case.
Lake County Board Chairman Robert Depke (R-Gurnee), who has spearheaded the local Great Lakes effort, said he will begin a search this week for a team of consultants to put together Great Lakes’ presentation for the base closure commission.
Great Lakes advocates will get a one-hour slot to make their case before the commission during hearings this spring.
Such a presentation will be expensive, officials expect.
Illinois officials said they expect San Diego and Orlando to spend more than $100,000 on their lobbying efforts.
The grass-roots group Great Lakes Volunteers Organized in Concerned Effort, which has raised some $60,000 in contributions from units of local government, still is trying to raise money to pay for consultants.
“We don’t want to lose out because we didn’t do a good job, or because we were underfunded,” said Ron Weeks, vice chairman of VOICE.
Depke and other municipal leaders have asked every city and town in Lake County to kick in 10 cents for every resident toward the cause.
The Lake County Board last week donated $40,000. To date, North Chicago, where the base is located, is the largest municipal contributor with $10,000.
Behind the scenes, local activists also hope to meet privately with members of the commission to air their case. Depke said he has not yet scheduled any meetings, but hopes to do so this month.
“Everybody’s going to have a chance to make their case,” Depke said. “We have to make sure ours is the best.”
