Pena defends Coast Guard station closures > Eastport lifesaving unit among 23 posts slated for discontinuance to eliminate deficit

BOSTON — Technology and shifts in personnel will more than make up for the loss of 23 lifesaving stations slated to be closed by the Coast Guard, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena said Monday.

Pena said the stations, including the Eastport station, must be closed if the federal government is to cut back spending enough to eliminate the deficit.

But Pena said he was convinced the stations could be eliminated without jeopardizing the safety of boaters. To ease the blow, personnel at the bases being closed are being shifted to other stations nearby, he said.

“Let’s be clear about one thing,” Pena said. “We can’t have Congress requiring we eliminate the deficit in seven years and at the same time continue to operate the Coast Guard with all stations.”

The closures, announced earlier this year, are part of a four-year plan to cut Coast Guard operations by $400 million and 4,000 people. The 23 Coast Guard stations scheduled for closure are in Oregon, Rhode Island, Maine, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and California.

The transportation chief was joined by Defense Secretary William Perry in the tour of Coast Guard operations in Boston Harbor. Perry referred to the trip as “management by walking around.”

The two began their day aboard one of the Coast Guard’s new high-speed lifeboats. The 47-foot motorboat, based in Gloucester, is twice as fast as the 44-foot boats usually stationed at the lifesaving bases. In rough seas, the new boat also can bail itself out and right itself in the event of a capsize.

Combined with newer, faster helicopters and the automatic distress beepers being carried by more and more boats, rescuers are getting to distressed boaters faster and easier than before, said Lt. Cmdr. Jim McPherson, a Coast Guard spokesman.

For example, last week a fishing boat caught fire off Nantucket. The crew immediately turned on their beacon, which helped a Coast Guard helicopter reach them in just a half-hour, despite visibility of just 50 feet, McPherson said.

“That’s something we just couldn’t have done before,” McPherson said. “The new technology really does take the search out of search-and-rescue.”

But not all Coast Guard equipment is new. The cutter Sorrel, which Pena and Perry boarded to watch a crew tend channel markers at the harbor’s mouth, is more than 50 years old.

The crew’s efficiency drew Pena’s praise just the same.

He marveled at how easily the men and women of the Sorrel had hoisted up an enormous, solar-powered buoy, scraped it clean of barnacles and seaweed, readjusted its electronic equipment and dropped it back into the sea.

Pena also defended Coast Guard’s decision to close stations but to keep the private jet used by the Coast Guard’s commandant, Adm. Robert Kramek. The jet is the Coast Guard’s only aircraft not dedicated to daily search-and-rescue or law enforcement operations.

U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., has suggested the $2 million a year needed to run the jet could be used to retain the lifesaving stations instead.

But Pena said the jet, which carried him to Boston Monday, represented a savings for taxpayers. The 12-seat Gulfstream jet was donated to the Coast Guard by the Air Force and replaced a 20-year-old plane that would have cost $20 million to replace.

A Coast Guard spokesman in Washington, Lt. Cmdr. Pat Philbin, said the need for a long-range, command and control jet for the commander of each of the armed forces is a separate issue from the need to cut the Coast Guard’s $3 billion annual budget by 12 percent.