Pentagon defends environmental estimates for closing bases

Members of the Base Closure and Realignment Commission on Thursday questioned the Pentagon's $949 million estimate to clean up the 33 major military installations it has recommended for closure.

Several commissioners expressed concern that environmental restoration price tags might far exceed the department's estimates, substantially cutting the savings projected for this base-closure round and potentially eating into dollars reserved for military transformation.

For instance, Defense officials have said it will cost $23 million to scrub the massive New London Submarine Base of nuclear and other hazardous materials. But Connecticut lawmakers, in an effort to shield the base from closure, estimate environmental cleanup at $125 million, while the Navy expects to spend $154 million for all environmental costs.

"Twenty-three million dollars doesn't seem realistic to me to clean up that base even to an industrial standard," said Commission Chairman Anthony Principi. "My only concern is if it's $230 million or higher, who bears the cost of that?"

The New London base, home to several nuclear submarines, contains six Superfund sites, a factor that could drive up closure costs dramatically.

A senior Defense official countered that the department's $2.6 billion estimate for environmental cleanup costs for the 1995 base-closure round was short by $600 million. Since then, the department has improved the environmental state of military installations and its processes for projecting cleanup costs.

"Those estimates are pretty solid," said Philip Grone, deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment. Grone added that the numbers could change if unexpected work arises at one of the sites, but there is not a "huge swath of things we don't know."

The Defense Department does not directly consider environmental cleanup costs when making base-closure recommendations, largely because doing so would provide a "perverse incentive that would reward through retention polluted sites," Grone said.

Under base-closure law, the independent commission must factor in environmental costs when it makes its own recommendations, which are due to the president Sept. 8. The military must restore bases to a "current-use" or industrial standard. In many cases, it is then up to communities or private developers to cover additional cleanup costs required when turning an installation into an office park, residential area or some other civilian use.