• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Navy Projected Mass Savings From Naval Postgraduate School Closure

Posted on: Monday, 22 August 2005, 00:00 CDT

Aug. 21--Newly released Department of Defense reports and documents show for the first time why the Naval Postgraduate School was put on and then removed from the Pentagon's base closure and consolidation list before the lineup was made public in May.

Top Navy officials said they wanted the Monterey school on the list because closure would save the Pentagon nearly $90 million annually "with payback expected immediately."

That analysis, which has been undercut by Monterey officials, calculated that closure would ultimately save the government anywhere from $932 million to $1.12 billion during the next 20 years, but without taking into account the millions of dollars it would require to train the same personnel elsewhere.

Minutes of Pentagon meetings from throughout April show that executive teams debated several scenarios in case of a Navy school closure, including sending Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center to Mississippi or leaving it in Monterey. Either scenario would present almost immediate payback, Marine Lt. Col. Mark Murphy told team members, according to the Defense Department minutes.

The minutes show the team debated and eventually adjusted the cost of relocating the school's information technology to another base, calculating that the adjustments raised the potential 20-year savings by nearly $50 million.

Other released documents describe the economic impact that closure of the Navy school and the Army's Defense Language Institute would have on the Monterey area. Closing the Navy school, the documents say, would cause a total loss of 6,684 jobs from 2006 to 2011, representing 2.84 percent of local employment. A similar report made for privatizing the language institute shows a loss of 10,944 jobs, or 4.65 percent of the work force.

One report written in April and made public this month says students who would have attended the Navy school should instead be sent to private universities. That report guided a recommendation to close the Navy school, a recommendation that remained in place until just days before the Pentagon announced its closure and consolidation list May 13.

The report, prepared by the Education and Training Joint Cross Services Group, disputes local arguments that the school's "military value" overrides cost concerns. With the federal base closure commission preparing to start voting on its closure recommendations this week, Navy school supporters have focused on the school's military value while shifting attention away from Monterey's high cost of living.

The report's summary says the group's "military judgment" was that "privatization provided the highest overall military value to the department."

But the financial analysis in the report glaringly leaves out tuition costs for the 1,500 or so students who would presumably be sent to private universities. It also reported the median house value in the Monterey area as $265,800. The real figure for Monterey County was $698,000 in July.

Monterey City Manager Fred Meurer, who plays a leading role in local efforts to retain the Navy school and the language institute in Monterey, said he couldn't understand how the Pentagon could have failed to include tuition costs.

"We gave up on trying to figure out how they got their numbers," he said.

The report underscores a long-running rift within the Navy that flared after a 2000 article in the journal Naval Institute Proceedings by Navy school graduate Lt. Cmdr. Janice Graham, who argued that it would be cheaper to send Navy graduate students to civilian universities.

That article was followed immediately by another piece countering its claims. It was written by retired Adm. Henry Mauz of Pebble Beach, who is president of the Navy school's private foundation and is active in the retention effort.

Mauz wrote that Graham's recommendations to privatize "seem to reflect the notion that one graduate degree will serve the department just as well as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth."

The debate has continued since, with top Navy officials telling the secretary of defense earlier this year that the Navy "wanted out of the education business," according to former Central Coast Congressman Leon Panetta, co-chairman of California's Council on Base Support and Retention.

In a May hearing before the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission, Navy Secretary Gordon England, who had just replaced Paul Wolfowitz to serve as acting deputy secretary of defense, acknowledged he had long favored that position when he testified the Pentagon would save money by closing the Navy school and consolidating it with other schools.

"Frankly," he told commission Chairman Anthony Principi, "you could save a lot of money in the case of Monterey."

Despite the savings, England testified in the Washington hearing that other considerations ruled in the end, and it was the opportunity for U.S. officers to interact with foreign students that moved him and other Navy leaders to change their minds.

"We were, frankly, afraid to take the chance that the value we had built up in those institutions -- we were afraid we could not replicate that," he said. "You look around the world today at all the people we deal with, invariably they came to school here. Not only did we get to know 'em, they got to know each other."

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark said that all kinds of merger and closure ideas had been considered, but ultimately, he said, "this is a battle for ideas and ideals."

Meurer is not the only one to question the Pentagon's numbers.

Last week, The New York Times reported that several of the nine BRAC commissions said the Defense Department may have overestimated its predicted $50 billion in savings.

Meurer and others have been frustrated by the slow release of department documents during the base closure process because it leaves little time to prepare counter-arguments to commissioners, who will decide this week which bases are closed or merged.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had promised that this closure round would be the most open in the program's 15-year history. The Pentagon, however, began releasing closure data almost a month after it was promised, and much of it was still classified and unavailable to elected officials without security clearance.

Only after 19 senators sent a protest letter to the president did the materials begin to be declassified in June.

-----

To see more of the Monterey County Herald, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.montereyherald.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Monterey County Herald (Monterey, Calif.)

More News in this Category