Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo has been closed for 10 years.
Posted on 05/15/2005 8:22:40 AM PDT by SmithL
VALLEJO - When news came last week that the most prominent California military bases had been passed over during this round of closings, that was just fine with the Bay Area.
It's still recovering from the last round.
Case in point: Mare Island Naval Shipyard, at one time the biggest employer in Napa and Solano counties. It was marked for closure in 1993 after nearly 150 years of building and repairing everything from paddle-wheeled gunboats to nuclear submarines.
Today, a dozen years after Vallejo learned that the bustling installation that had driven the city for generations would shut down, Mare Island is just starting to show the first flickers of new life, including a handful of model homes, the first businesses and a few restored office buildings. City leaders say it could take another decade to become a thriving community.
There are parallels here for Concord to consider as it celebrates news of the impending closure of its military base. That city won't suffer the huge job loss and real estate plunge that Vallejo did -- the weapons station has been virtually mothballed since 1999 -- but it does face some major environmental cleanup and a long planning process. Concord hopes the base will become home to housing, businesses and parks, just as Vallejo envisions.
The master developer for Mare Island expects to spend about $260 million on infrastructure and improvements. Vallejo has seen no monetary profit so far, and it doesn't expect that for years, said Vallejo spokesman Mark Mazzaferro.
As Contra Costa County's biggest city eagerly begins the long-awaited transformation, it can draw two major lessons from Mare Island. Have patience, and have a plan.
Environmental cleanup is job No. 1
"The bottom line is, environmental cleanup really rules the day," said Gil Hollingsworth, 60, a retired Navy man and Vallejo's manager for the project since the beginning. The pace of cleanup determines how fast development happens on any closed military base.
To speed things up for Mare Island, Vallejo negotiated with the government for an "early transfer" of the base, which at the time was a new process. It meant Lennar Mare Island, the developer, would take title of 650 acres and take over cleanup, doing it cheaper and faster than the government could. The Navy agreed to pay $80 million.
Five of the nine areas will be clean by the end of this year, and the rest should be done by 2009. At the government's pace, the work could have taken decades, said Joshua Sternberg, Lennar's site development manager.
But in the plan for cleanup also lies the need for patience. Environmental work and building infrastructure make almost invisible progress, said Michael Ammann, president of the Solano Economic Development Corporation.
People who drive onto the base still see huge old buildings with broken windows, crumbling roads and empty parking lots.
Floyd Judd, 72, and his wife, Monique, both worked at the shipyard when it was producing nuclear submarines. Last week, they came looking for cabinets. An outlet opened up there in a light industrial building three months ago, its yellow sign the only bright spot in the parking lot.
"(The base) was basically the same, except things were boarded up. You don't see many people around," Judd said. "That's the sad part. There's not really much activity going on over there."
The city's conversion manager, Hollingsworth, bristles at this idea.
He ticks off milestones. Seventy-five businesses are open. About 1,700 people work there every day, not including the hundreds who work temporary construction jobs. Lennar sold its first 73 homes this year before they were even built. The first residents will move in by early June.
"I'm always astounded when people say, 'Oh, nothing's happening,'" Hollingsworth said. "I stop them right there and say, 'Tell you what, tomorrow morning, 8 o'clock, be at my office and we'll go out there and show you what's happening.'"
53-member committee hammered out plan
The development plan for the island came out of a 53-member committee whose size could be considered unwieldy. But involving people from all over the region worked in the city's favor, said Vice Mayor Joanne Schivley.
"I think it kept us out of the courts," she said.
The city adopted the committee's plan in 1994, chose a master developer in 1997 and struck a development agreement in 2000.
The layout basically follows the Navy's footprint, another time-saver. In general, residential and industrial uses, which require different levels of cleanup, stayed where they were.
Touro University, for instance, leased a Navy college campus, signing up in 1998. The school is on 44 acres and has about 1 million square feet of academic space. It's using a quarter of that but plans to grow.
Richard Hassel became Touro's vice president of administration after a Navy career. Leading up to the closure, he did a radio show and wrote a weekly column to keep residents up to date. But it was hard to tell then how fast the base would turn around, he said.
"I think naively we thought that all that (the revitalization) could happen in a five-year period," he said. "It's been 10 years, and we are now starting to see some real, genuine economic development. ... When you look at other communities that have gone through the same sort of experience, that's rocket speed."
Lennar and the Chamber of Commerce have drawn to the island businesses that appreciate the expansive spaces and relatively low cost of renting. Lennar estimates more than 2 million square feet of space has been leased. Lennar's goal is 7 million.
Other businesses on the island range from an aluminum boat manufacturer to an electrical contractor to a printing franchise. Some of the larger buildings house companies such as XKT Engineering, which fabricates multiton steel plates for bridge retrofit work.
Ammann's group promotes the county to national and international real estate brokers, but he says it's been tough to match companies with older buildings that range from 20,000 to more than 100,000 square feet.
Once more land is cleaned up and ready for new construction, more businesses will bite, Ammann said. Others will wait until the island gains serious momentum.
"People (will) say, 'Oh, Mare Island's a deal, I gotta get there,'" Ammann said. "They should have been there this year and not two years down the road."
Until then, the leaders of the island's reinvention will have patience, and stick to the plan.
Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo has been closed for 10 years.
Was married there some 33 years ago...
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