Locals fear Crane naval center may shut down

CRANE, Ind. -- Though the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center is helping supply weapons America needs to win the war against terrorism, the facility could lose the battle to survive government cost-cutting.\nCongress is hammering out a national defense spending bill that likely will include provisions for downsizing or closing dozens of military installations by the middle of this decade. Though no official list of targeted bases has been released, business owners and officials in southern Indiana fear one could be the 60-year-old Crane facility.\nCrane provides thousands of jobs on site and through contracts and generates about $241 million a year in wages, according to an economic study last year by the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.\n"If Crane is ever closed, the impact would be devastating in every way -- economically, employment, culture," said Jim Shelton, manager of Technology Service Corp., a Monroe County company that does business with Crane. "There would be a giant hole left in southern Indiana."\nShelton and several other officials and business leaders have formed the Southern Indiana Business Alliance to sound the alert about Crane in the eight rural counties that surround the 32,000-acre base.\nBut they may have a tough job drumming up interest.\nFormer Crane commander Steve Howard, who now heads the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, said the intensified activity around Crane since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks makes it difficult to convince people that base closings are a possibility.\nJust four days after the attacks, the Senate voted 53-47 to begin a new round of base closings. Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., supported the measure. And on Oct. 15, eight former defense secretaries signed a letter favoring base closings and sent it to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.\n"Our biggest enemy right now is complacency here in Indiana," Howard said. "Things are happening in Washington. People think Crane has always been around and always will be."\nLinton Mayor Jimmie K. Wright has seen Crane weather all types of threats, both foreign and domestic.\n"Crane got looked at hard in 1995, but they are about the last major military installation in the state. I think they\'ll be OK," Wright said.\nMost people know the facility as a storage site for some 650,000 tons of munitions, enough to supply the Army and Navy for the first 30 days of a full-scale war.\nCrane's other role is technical, with about a third of its 3,200 workers employed as engineers, scientists and high-skilled technicians manufacturing items like night-vision goggles and guidance systems for aircraft.\n"Their high-tech performance is what keeps them vital, not the lobbying in Washington," Wright said.\nBut Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va., said lobbying is what has kept many military installations alive.\n"Most of these military installations serve a political purpose rather than national security," he said.\nSepp said most communities that feared economic calamity when their bases closed survived by converting the facilities into industrial parks and other uses for the private sector.\nBut Howard said Crane is an exception because the area is isolated and lacks commercial development.\nRick Graves, who owns a plumbing, heating and air conditioning business in Switz City, said two of his 20 employees are detailed directly to Crane, while much of the work he does in houses comes from people who work there.\n"They are a major factor down here," Graves said. "We'd like to see them here always"