Six new North Carolina sites named for possible Navy airfield

By Jeff Hampton and Kate Wiltrout
The Virginian-Pilot

After months of speculation about secret talks between the Navy and North Carolina officials, the state revealed a list of a half-dozen alternative sites for a jet landing field Tuesday, including two in fast-growing Camden County.

One of the new alternatives includes the disputed mega-landfill site at the Chesapeake border.

The six new possible airfield sites were released Tuesday during a meeting in Raleigh of a group appointed by Gov. Mike Easley to study alternatives to a Washington County tract the Navy selected four years ago, said Schorr Johnson, spokesman for state Sen. Marc Basnight, D-Dare.

The Navy wants to build an outlying landing field, or OLF, where F/A-18 pilots from Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach and Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Havelock, N.C., would practice aircraft carrier landings.

The latest list from North Carolina means that 22 sites in that state and Virginia now have been suggested as possible locations for the OLF.

One of two Camden sites includes land that had been slated for the landfill until a new state law prohibited solid waste dumps near wildlife refuges. The other falls within thousands of acres of farmland near the Camden-Currituck County border known as Hales Lake and not far from the Blackwater USA complex.

"It surprises me because it's so close to a metropolitan area," said Camden County Commissioner Mike Andrews.

Five new developments in Camden County that would include about 2,500 housing units have been proposed recently, the largest just a few miles from the potential sites for an OLF.

One of two sites in Gates County is on land south of Gatesville that includes the Chowan Swamp Game Land. Land in southern Gates and northern Perquimans County near the border with Pasquotank County was also added to the list. The tract is north of farmland that was already under consideration by the Navy for an airfield.

Basnight, the longtime and politically influential state Senate president pro tem, is against locating an OLF in northeastern North Carolina, Johnson said.

Other new potential sites include land on the Jones-Onslow county lines and on the Duplin-Pender county lines in southeastern North Carolina, Johnson said.

Navy officials plan to decide within the next 60 days whether to conduct in-depth environmental studies of the alternatives.

Any of the sites chosen for further study would be in addition to five others in North Carolina that had previously been identified as candidates for the field. Each of those sites is still under consideration. In 2003, the Navy named one of them, in Washington County, as its preference.

That choice met with opposition, however, and Gov. Easley appointed the OLF study group three years ago to find alternatives to the Washington County site. He reactivated the group last week, and it met Tuesday.

The new list of sites originated from discussions between the Navy and William G. Ross Jr., secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said Seth Effron, spokesman for Easley.

Rear Adm. David Anderson, vice commander of the Norfolk-based Fleet Forces Command, said after the three-hour meeting that the Navy has been working with North Carolina officials since March to identify alternatives.

"Just like we have with Virginia, we have trust and in-depth dialogue going on about each site early," before Navy Secretary Donald Winter "makes a decision about what he wants to put into the environmental impact statement," Anderson said.

Anderson said state and Navy officials had a conference call with North Carolina legislators in Washington, D.C., Tuesday morning, informing them of the suggested locations. The North Carolina delegation has united with Easley in its opposition to the Washington County site, which is a few miles from a national wildlife refuge that attracts tens of thousands of migrating waterfowl.

Anderson said the governor's working group would schedule meetings in the potentially affected communities, and that the Navy looked forward to hearing feedback from residents and county officials. He said he hoped for "a meaningful dialogue."

The admiral acknowledged that the two new sites in southeastern North Carolina, at 128 and 152 nautical miles away, were distant from Oceana, where eight squadrons of Super Hornets eventually would be based. Anderson said he passed along all the recommendations from Virginia and North Carolina to Winter last week.

In July, Virginia proposed 10 possible sites in five counties, and U.S. Sen. John Warner asked the Navy to reconsider Fort Pickett. All five Virginia counties' boards of supervisors voted against the landing field proposal - largely a symbolic gesture because they don't have the power to stop such a project.

Anderson said he expects Winter to decide by Nov. 15 whether any of the states' recommendations should be added to the five North Carolina sites already under consideration.

"It would be presumptuous of me to say what he'd do with the information," Anderson said of the recommendations. "Realistically, we're very focused on the sites close to Oceana."

Adding new sites to the environmental impact statement would trigger additional analyses and a formal round of public hearings in the affected communities.

Jeff Hampton, (252) 338-0159, jeff.hampton@pilotonline.com