Goodbye, gravy-yard (continued)

And here’s an interesting story about that last round of base closures. My friend the White Hat claims that a big reason that the Shipyard survived that last round was Vice Admiral George W. Emory, who commanded every submarine in the Atlantic Fleet. The firsthand knowledge of the outstanding work done in Kittery that Vice Admiral Emory gleaned in his position, along with where he was from, supposedly compelled him to go to bat for the Shipyard.

And where is Vice Admiral Emory from? Sanford. Class of 1959.

I love the Sanford guy looking out for Sanford aspect of that story, but I can’t say for certain if it’s apocryphal or not. After retiring, Mr. Emory became president of a division of Raytheon, a massive defense-industry corporation, and achieved every Sanford boy’s dream of buying a house in Kennebunkport. I reached him there by telephone while preparing this story, but he refused to comment.

Whether Mr. Emory had some influence last time is immaterial now, anyway. I started to wonder what might happen to the Shipyard, and what uses it might serve. White Hat had some good suggestions. Maybe it could be a Coast Guard facility, or turn itself towards another type of heavy industry, like some shipyards on the Great Lakes had, building trains, or streetcars. Building something, anything big.

Who was working on that angle? Aiming to find out, I went down to the Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce and spoke to Ginny Griffith, the Business Development Manager. She was very nice, received me warmly and right away even though I had no appointment, but when I asked about a back-up plan, she didn’t even want to talk about it.

"That’s in the back of everybody’s mind. We just don’t want that to be the focus right now because if we start offering solutions people might forget the facts that actually build the case," Mrs. Griffith said. She would say that companies have already made inquires about the spot, but little else about what types of companies they were, although she did use the word resorts. Even that much she was loathe to say because, "We don’t want to deter or distract people’s feelings that there is a solution in place should it happen because there really isn’t. There really isn’t. And that’s our biggest concerns, the dollars and the numbers of jobs. The money that people make there."

I asked her if she gave any credence to the talk that being on the Pentagon hit list had anything to do with Maine having been a Democratic blue state in the last presidential election, with two Republican Senators that the White House often can’t corral.

"I think when you get to a situation like this, that’s minimal in the big picture," Mrs. Griffith said. "But it is about how our government operates; that’s the political piece. Not what party you’re affiliated with . . . I work with businesses every day, and I can’t think of many CEOs or CFOs that would shut down the most profitable, cost-effective, productive, efficient facility in their entire business. As a business decision, which is what they are claiming this is based on, I am very challenged by that. Whether you’re blue or red isn’t the issue, but how the political process is managed is."

What about the ramifications of environmentally cleaning a place that has been a nuclear military facility since 1958? She said, "That’s another thing that we didn’t really bring to the forefront until we needed it because we didn’t want to raise a lot of awareness." What does that mean? It means that the Shipyard would have to be cleared of any radioactive contamination before it could turn to other industry, like the Great Lakes facilities that my friend the White Hat had mentioned. A closed Shipyard, where they’ve been yanking nuclear reactors out of boats since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, might very well be a Superfund site for God knows how long before it could even start to become something else.

The Great Lakes facilities didn’t have that problem. Great Lakes ships don’t have nuclear propulsion. If they did, the Edmund Fitzgerald would have probably put those 15 more miles behind her, and made it to the safety of White Fish Bay, like the song says.

After the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce, I spoke to Jonathan Carter, Kittery’s Town Manager, and he hit all the same notes. Yes, people were starting to look at worst-case scenario plans. In fact, he had just been to Denver to study communities that had suffered through the closure of a military base, but he didn’t want to say too much, either. All of his energy was going to support "the Congressionals" in their fight to save the Shipyard.

I drove past where Sprauge Electric used to be on my way back into Sanford, where I sought out Mark Green, the Town Manager. Drawing from what seemed like the same talking-points memo as the others, he assured me that Sanford was "beginning to work on the planning for a possible closure," but "we’re trying to put our energy into fighting." Unlike the others, Mr. Green tried to be upbeat as well as stoic. While agreeing that a closure would be terrible for Sanford, he also portrayed a town whose economic temperature was rising, citing as evidence 700 housing units either already approved, undergoing the approval process, or about to come before the Sanford Planning Board; and a two and a half million dollar deal to turn former mill space into more residential space and artist studios.

But where will the breadwinners of these 700 new Sanford families work? "We’ve got some large retail entities, they’re big box stores, that are likely to be applying for permits here in the next week or two," Mr. Green said.

So we can all work at Target or Best Buy. Doesn’t that sound great? Welcome to the New American Workplace.

That triggered memories of how a majority of Sanford residents, along with the rest of Maine, had voted down the proposed Indian casino that was to be built there in 2003, so I asked how Mr. Green thought that vote would go in Sanford if it were held within the new context of today.

"I wouldn’t even speculate," he said. "I was fortunate in that I wasn’t here for that. I missed the whole thing, so I’ve chosen to keep my views on that to myself, since they don’t matter at this point." I can respect that, I told him, but in the areas of Connecticut where the only big industries are submarine yards and casinos, after their shipyards landed on the Pentagon list, the casino jobs had to look like pure gold, no matter how poorly they paid, and how little hope for advancement they offered.

"Yeah, you’re probably right," Mr. Green said. "Obviously, if you don’t have a job, anything is better than nothing."

And that’s the most essential fact. If you don’t have a job, anything is better than nothing. To that end, there should have been a realistic plan to turn the Shipyard swords into ploughshares 10 or 15 years ago at the very least. Given the type of work done there, even that would have probably been a late start. Now, to just say that we’re going to fight, fight, fight, and, if the likely but unthinkable happens, we’ve got some excellent economic impact studies lined up, well, that’s cold comfort.

However, all of that can’t be put on Mrs. Griffith, Mr. Green, or Mr. Carter because this problem has obviously been coming a long time, and somebody holding much higher offices than theirs should have been attending to it.

But that didn’t happen.

Back at the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce, Mrs. Griffith had said, "An analogy that someone said that I think was really good is that we have a terminal diagnosis with a 15 to 20 percent chance of a cure, and because of what those workers have done, we’ve got a medication." I hope with everything I am that she’s right and the place can be saved, and since there is no alternate plan that somehow preserves jobs if that doesn’t happen, all we can do is fight. So write letters. Show up at the rallies. Purchase a yellow Save Our Shipyard T-shirt (I still have mine from the last round of closings in the 1990s), and let’s play the crummy hand out as best we can. We have to give our all in trying to prevail. There are kids with crooked teeth in Sanford, and lots of other towns, depending on us.

Rick Wormwood can be reached at rickwormwood@excite.com

Former governor Angus King weighs in on the base closings on page 3 (click below), and on page 4, Pat LaMarche, the 2004 Green Vice-Presidential nominee, speaks out on governor Baldacci's role.