By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

Eleven days before the Pentagon released its base closure list, the Navy wanted to shut down Brunswick Naval Air Station.

Newly declassified documents show that the Pentagon overruled the Navy two days later, preserving the base but going along with the Navy’s proposal to remove all of Brunswick’s planes.

The documents also show that the Navy got sloppy.

That’s the contention of the local base’s supporters, who have begun sifting through tens of thousands of pages of just-released memos, meeting minutes, charts, graphs and analyses that led the Pentagon to propose closing 33 major bases and realigning 29 others.

The Navy was in such a hurry to close Brunswick and remove the planes that it didn’t take the time to double-check its numbers, said Richard Tetrev, a former Navy commander who is leading the community fight to save the Brunswick base.

Tetrev believes he can use the Navy’s work to show the base closure commission that Brunswick deserves to keep all of its planes.

“Their analysis was so poor, we’re going to blow their socks off,” Tetrev said.

For weeks, Maine leaders have been squeezing the Pentagon in hopes of receiving the new data. U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, co-sponsored legislation to delay the closure process until the data shakes loose. Two weeks ago, U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, co-chairs of the Homeland Security Committee, subpoenaed the information.

Late last week, the data stream began flowing.

Tens of thousands of pages of information arrived at the committee’s Capitol Hill office. Massive files appeared on the Pentagon Web site.

Those files, too voluminous for many home computers to retrieve, are being examined by staffers from Maine’s congressional delegation and by local experts working for the state’s threatened installations.

Their aim is to find something to prove that their bases ought to remain open and thriving.

“We haven’t found the smoking gun yet,” said Ralph Dean, a retired Navy captain who is working to preserve the Brunswick base. “Instead, we’re finding lots of little smoking guns.”

Among their discoveries is that the Navy never estimated what it would cost to build facilities for more planes at Jacksonville Naval Air Station, the Florida base where the Brunswick planes would be relocated under the proposal.

Meanwhile, the Navy figured that it could save demolition money by leaving a World War II-era hangar standing.

Yet, the demolition has been planned for years, said John James, spokesman for the Brunswick base. It’s the last stage in a modernization effort that has included the destruction of two other aged hangars and the construction of a state-of-the-art $34 million facility.

If the base stays open, as the Pentagon now suggests, the hangar will come down, Dean said. There would be no savings.

Even before the new documents began going public, the task force and the Maine delegation were shooting holes in the Navy’s arguments.

Citing Navy figures, the Pentagon announced on May 13 that relocating Brunswick’s planes to Jacksonville would save almost $239 million over 20 years.

Those numbers are wrong, say Brunswick’s supporters.

By 2011, a new generation of maritime patrol aircraft is expected to be introduced. The replacement for Brunswick’s P-3, a version of the Boeing 737, will not even be maintained by the military anymore. The maintenance group – and the proposed savings – would be gone.

All of these details are expected to be discussed when the closure commission holds a formal hearing in Boston on July 6.

“I believe that they did such a shoddy job, we’re going to succeed,” Tetrev said.