Base closures present state with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

On Feb. 28, the Defense Department announced its fourth and latest round of military base closures. Nationwide, two dozen major bases and more than 80 smaller installations are recommended to be shut down, greatly shrunk, or consolidated with other facilities. In California, the Long Beach Naval Shipyard has been recommended for closure. With this closure and other realignments, our state will lose an estimated 5,000 civilian jobs.

The Defense Department is shutting down bases out of financial necessity. In the last eight years, the nation's armed forces have shrunk by 33 percent, but the number of military installations has declined by only 20 percent. Through base closures, the Defense Department can cut costs in this post-Cold War era of tight military budgets.

But this current round of closures requires a different approach from earlier ones. Based on what we've learned from earlier closures, we must prepare new strategies for redeveloping these properties for civilian use.

Base closures represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape California's growth and economic development.

Our state's two dozen closed (and to-be-closed) installations include thousands of acres of flat, relatively developable land adjacent to some of our largest cities. In many cases, such as with the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, these sites are close to mass transit, rail lines and freeways, and they are already served by existing infrastructure.

On these properties, we can create mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented communities which can offer people livable neighborhoods close to .jobs. Through this infill development, we not only can knit together long-fractured communities, but also offer our state the welcome alternative of growth without suburban sprawl.

But redevelopment of former military bases into model 21st century communities is proving far more difficult than anticipated a few years ago. Surprisingly, the roadblock isn't deciding what to do with the properties, as many observers had predicted. Through recent changes in federal law, surrounding communities usually have the largest say in determining what former bases will be used for.

Instead, the new hurdle is the tremendous up-front cost of making these lands development-ready - specifically, the removal of toxic contaminants, the renovation or demolition of run-down and/or inappropriate buildings, and the improvement or installation of infrastructure, such as roads, utilities and sewers.

Military bases require this costly up-front investment, because the Defense Department is exempt from local building and life-safety codes. If it doesn't want to spend the money for up-to-date well-maintained facilities, it doesn't have to.

Access can present a problem. At Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, the on-and off-ramps to the Bay Bridge and waterfront causeways need major renovation.

Other costs of making former military bases development-ready can be truly daunting. At Orange County's 1,620-acre El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, an estimated $300 million must be spent on roadway and utilities improvements to accommodate the proposed commercial, industrial and educational uses.

At San Diego's 520-acre Naval Training Center, which was appraised several years ago at $500 million, the cost of infrastructure improvements is so high that the land is technically valueless, "worth less than zero" in the words of one city official.

Municipalities must carry out these costly up-front investments. Otherwise, private and public redevelopment projects will never go forward. But where can hard-pressed municipalities find the money? Voters are loath to raise taxes, and they are unlikely to approve enormous bond issues to pay for a vision of their community 10, 20, or 30 years in the future when they often reject funding measures to pay for new schools and police stations today.

Fortunately, the Defense Department is required to pay for the clean-up of contaminated land in former military bases. The federal government also funds some planning costs for redevelopment strategies.

But the federal government must be more proactive in speeding up the transition of these properties to civilian use and paying some of the up-front redevelopment costs.

After all, the Defense Department, not the municipalities, deferred vital maintenance on its military bases all these years. Likewise, the Defense Department stands to save vast sums through base closures, an estimated $4 billion a year from the bases declared redundant in 1989, 1991 and 1993. And the Defense Department could save billions more by actually closing all the bases scheduled to be shut down.

According to a recent report by the Business Executives for National Security, more than one-third of the bases that were already supposed to be closed are still open. These continuing operations will cost the Defense Department $15 billion in the next five years.

Of course, nobody predicted that closing hundreds of military installations was going to be easy. But the nation (and California in particular) still have not reaped all the extraordinary potential benefits of base closures. The federal government must forge stronger partnerships with communities near former military bases so they can carry out these once-in-a-lifetime redevelopment opportunities.

Fisher is a principal at ROMA Design Group, an urban design and planning firm involved in preparing reuse plans for several military bases