The earliest significant event in the Fort Ord conversion process was the announcement in January 1990 of then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney's "Proposal for Installation Closures and Force Realignment," which included the Pentagon's plan to close Fort Ord and move the Seventh Infantry Division to Fort Lewis, Washington.
Then-Congressman Leon Panetta immediately appointed a community task force to assist in evaluating the proposal's repercussions on Monterey County.8 The task force's leading recommendations, in a report presented two months later, were to remove Fort Ord from the list of base closures and postpone the movement of the Seventh Infantry Division pending further study. A number of recommendations were related to the economic reverberations of the base's closure; others called for the Defense Department to improve the base's capability to handle large aircraft (which would offset one of then-rival Fort Lewis' advantages, albeit at a cost of $60 to $120 million). The task force also stated that base closure "would require extraordinary up-front funding ranging from $116 million to $357 million to support environmental restoration efforts." Finally, it quantified the economic effects of closure on the community as follows: $731 million in lost salaries, $78 million in lost service and minor construction projects, $77 million in lost major military contracts, loss of 2,773 Army jobs, loss of 25,300 private-sector jobs, and reduction of personal income totaling $277 million.9
In terms of keeping Fort Ord active, these efforts were unavailing. Congress' passage of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 and the addition of the President's signature in November put the actual closure process on a formal track. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) was established and ordered to make its recommendations on military base closures to President Bush by July 1, 1991. The Base Closure Act in effect depoliticized a highly charged issue, the closure of military bases throughout the country. By reducing the probability of political selectivity--the BRAC list of base closures would have to be accepted or rejected in its entirety--the Base Closure Act made conceivable what many had previously considered improbable: closure of a military base of significant size.10
The military also was obliged to make its own official recommendations to BRAC. This was accomplished with the Pentagon's delivery of its list in April 1991; Fort Ord was the largest Army base on the Pentagon's list. The Pentagon's offer was accepted in July, and Fort Ord was placed on the BRAC list of base closures.
There were no voices calling for a new university in Monterey County at this point, nor did such an institution appear near the top of any list of priority sites in California, but it was not long before the idea began to materialize.