Before the Pentagon called for Brunswick Naval Air Station’s “realignment” – sending away its planes and most of its full-time personnel – the Navy called for its closure, Sen. Olympia Snowe said Friday.
“I can’t explain it,” Snowe said. “It’s inconceivable.”
Apparently, the Navy doesn’t value the Brunswick base’s mission and location as much as the Pentagon does, she said.
“The Pentagon overruled the Navy,” Snowe said Friday afternoon, just hours after a Washington meeting of Maine’s congressional delegation, Gov. John Baldacci and Anthony Principi, the chairman of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission.
The Maine leaders spent about an hour with Principi, who will be leading the examination of every base on the Pentagon list that was released May 13.
On Wednesday, Principi and at least one other commissioner are scheduled to visit Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery. On Thursday, the group will move to Brunswick. They are scheduled to spend up to four hours at the base, receiving briefings and touring the installation.
It’s hoped that they will leave with an appreciation of Brunswick’s importance to the protection of the Northeast, Snowe said.
Friday’s meeting was a prologue to next week’s meetings. Principi was shown maps created by leaders in Brunswick that show the closure of so many air bases throughout the Northeast. The local base remains the last fully operational, active-duty air base in the Northeast.
“We told him that,” Snowe said of the delegation’s visit. “Now, he’ll see it for himself.”
The delegation members all said they were encouraged by Friday’s meeting. Principi listened intently and was surprised by some of what he heard, Baldacci said.
“He was clearly very interested in what we had to say,” said the governor.
The nine-member closure commission is charged with examining the Pentagon list, looking for errors and listening to the affected communities. It may add bases to the list or remove them.
However, in the past four closure rounds – in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995 – about 85 percent of the bases on the Pentagon’s list were still there when the commission was done.
“I have a lot of confidence that Chairman Principi will not be a rubber stamp for the Pentagon,” Sen. Susan Collins said Friday.
Yet, neither the commission nor the public has all the information the Pentagon used to create its closure list.
By law, the Defense Department was to release the data it used to justify each move in its proposal within one week of the list’s release. However, only a small portion of the data has been disclosed. Pentagon leaders say the data needs to be checked for security concerns before it is released publicly.
Both Collins and Snowe say they don’t believe it. The two Maine Republicans and 19 other senators have signed a letter to the president asking for the data.
Collins, as chairwoman of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, may subpoena the data, she said. Meanwhile, Snowe has introduced legislation calling for the closure process to halt if the data is not released.
“We are not going to let the Department of Defense run the clock,” Snowe said. “Every day that they have lost for us is a day we will make up.”
The delegation and local leaders hope to use the data to dismantle the arguments that would leave Brunswick weakened and target Portsmouth for closure.
“You can’t dispute data you don’t have,” Snowe said. “It undermines the process.”
Meanwhile, leaders in Brunswick are hoping to get a chance to meet with the commissioners when they visit next week. That may not happen, though.
An exact schedule for the commissioners’ visit is still rough. At a minimum, members of the NAS Brunswick Task Force want 30 minutes.
“We’re the ones who have been working this for two years,” said Richard Tetrev, the group’s chairman and former second-in-command at the Brunswick base. “Nobody knows this base better than us.”
More than anything, the commissioners need to understand the importance of Brunswick’s location to keeping America safe, said Ralph Dean, a longtime volunteer for the group and a retired Navy captain.
By overturning the Navy’s decision, the Pentagon understood the base’s importance, he said. It was just a half-step, though.
“Once you make the decision to keep the base open, it makes no sense, financially or strategically, to move the aircraft,” Dean said.
Comments are no longer available on this story