PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) – Four community leaders from the region plan a trip to Washington next week to lobby again for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

The yard is a major employer in eastern New Hampshire and southern Maine, with peak civilian employment last year of 4,803.

It specializes in maintaining and overhauling nuclear submarines for the Navy, but is considered vulnerable in the Pentagon’s next round of base closings and realignments.

William McDonough, head of the Seacoast Shipyard Association, will accompany the community leaders in a mission to try to keep Portsmouth off the closing list.

“If you’re on that list, you’re dead,” McDonough, a retired Navy captain, said at a briefing Thursday.

The community leaders are Dick Ingram, president of the Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce; Portsmouth City Manager John Bohenko; Kennebunk (Maine) Savings Bank president Joel Stevens; and Sanford (Maine) Town Manager Mark Green. Congressmen and senators from both states are expected to send representatives with the delegation.

The base closings are part of the Pentagon’s continuing drive to eliminate duplicative bases and turn work over to contractors. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must recommend a list of target bases to a special commission by mid-May.

At the briefing, McDonough cited statistics on the yard’s importance to the region’s economy. He said the yard’s civilian payroll was $318 million last year, up 12 percent from $284 million in 2003.

Its much smaller military payroll rose 83 percent, from $16 million to $29.3 million. That reflected the Coast Guard’s decision to make the yard the home port for several cutters.

Portsmouth is one of four shipyards in the country left after previous base closings that are capable of overhauling the Navy’s nuclear submarines.

In New Hampshire, yard workers are concentrated in Rochester, Dover, Portsmouth and Somersworth, McDonough said.

In Maine, they are concentrated in the Sanford-Springvale area, Kittery and Kittery Point, South Berwick and Eliot, he said.

He said the trend for more workers to live in Maine is due largely to the higher cost of housing in New Hampshire.

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