A scouting visit to the Baltimore area by two busloads of employees from Fort Monmouth and the dispatching this fall of an "advance team" to Aberdeen Proving Ground have been postponed as New Jersey officials renew their efforts to block the planned closure of their 90-year-old base and the relocation of its important and lucrative military research work to Maryland.
A spokesman for the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center at Fort Monmouth confirmed yesterday that the bus trip, scheduled to take place yesterday, had been put off.
"We're not sure when it's going to be rescheduled," said the spokesman, Kashia Simmons.
Plans to transfer the first contingent of about 50 workers from the communications and electronics research center to Aberdeen in October also have been put on hold, spokesmen said yesterday.
Maryland officials expressed their disappointment over the delays but defended the planned relocation and expressed confidence that it would go forward.
The move of about 5,000 civilian defense workers from Monmouth, near the New Jersey coast, to Aberdeen was ordered in 2005 as part of a nationwide shuffle of military bases that is expected to bring Maryland as many as 60,000 jobs and 28,000 new households.
New Jersey officials complained bitterly at the time about the decision by the Defense Department's Base Realignment and Closure Commission to shutter Monmouth, which, like Aberdeen in Harford County, got its start during World War I. Officials have said that surveys of Monmouth workers - many of them veteran, highly paid engineers and scientists - indicate that 70 percent or more of them might retire or quit rather than move when their jobs are shifted to Aberdeen by 2011.
Simmons could not say exactly why the bus tour, which had been planned in conjunction with the Harford-based regional base-realignment office, had been postponed. He did say it had been delayed several times before "due to scheduling conflicts."
But John Poitras, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 1904, suggested the trip had been scotched because of complaints he had made about how it would have been funded. Poitras represents about 5,000 Monmouth workers, including engineers and scientists.
Congress has yet to approve funds to pay for the move of Monmouth's workers to Aberdeen, Poitras said, and he objected to the diversion of any funds meant to be spent on the base's mission of helping the "war fighter."
Meanwhile, New Jersey's senators and congressmen introduced a pair of bills this week aimed at scrutinizing more closely whether the Monmouth move would weaken military readiness and whether recent increases in the estimated costs of making the move negate the value of closing the New Jersey base.
The Asbury Park Press reported recently that the Army's fiscal 2008 budget projected the cost of closing Monmouth at $1.5 billion, about twice what had been estimated two years ago when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended the move as part of a nationwide shuffle of military operations.
"There's no savings," said Poitras. He contended that the cost estimates were manipulated to justify the base closing.
In the wake of the newspaper's report, New Jersey's congressional delegation has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the closing of Monmouth.
The electronics research center had been seeking about 50 volunteers to move to Maryland this fall and begin work as the first step in a phased plan to relocate all the center's 2,200 staff by the congressionally mandated 2011 deadline.
But before any Monmouth personnel can move, the Department of Defense must report to Congress that the relocation of workers to Maryland will not weaken the military's readiness, a spokesman said.
"Until we present that to Congress and explain how there's no impact on the war on terrorism, there can be no move," said Col. Archie Davis, public affairs director for the Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., which oversees base relocations. He said he couldn't predict when that report would be submitted.
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the Maryland Democrat whose district includes Aberdeen Proving Ground, said "efforts to meddle with a single base realignment or closure decision made two years ago completely undermine the whole concept of BRAC.
"While I understand the desire of New Jersey representatives to stand up for their state, Congress has never overturned a [BRAC] decision and we are not about to start now," Ruppersberger said in a statement.
Harford County Councilman Dion Guthrie said local officials were fighting a strong anti-relocation sentiment in New Jersey.
"People living and working in Monmouth still don't believe the base will close," Guthrie said. "They are doing everything they can to turn this process off. They really feel Harford County is not ready for BRAC."
But a spokeswoman for Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, who is leading the O'Malley administration's efforts to prepare Maryland for the influx of jobs and households from base realignment, said the state is ready.
"When all the smoke clears on all this other stuff that other people are pushing and promoting, the fact still remains [that] we're building our schools, we're widening our roads and preparing for 28,000 families that are coming to Maryland," said Samantha Kappalman, the lieutenant governor's press secretary.
James C. Richardson, Harford's economic development director, lamented the dispute and the shelving of the bus tour.
"We wanted to give them an opportunity under no pressure to see the area and to make some decisions for the employees and their families," he said.
"We're trying to do everything we can to make this as painless as certainly possible," Richardson added. "We're hoping that cooler heads will prevail and people will start working together and trying to get folks moving as soon as possible so these things do proceed. After all, the bottom line is, it's all about the war fighter out in the field."
tim.wheeler@baltsun.com
Sun reporters Matthew Hay Brown and Mary Gail Hare contributed to this article.