08/24/2026
Thirty-three years ago, Vallejo's Director of Economic Development, Alvaro da Silva, got the news that Mare Island Naval Shipyard had been designated for closure. Prior to that Al had been credited with bringing the ferry, Marine World, and Costco to Vallejo, but now he was faced with one of the largest base closures in the nation and it became his job to steer the city's recovery from it. Al used to say the whole job came down to being ready to catch the wave when an opportunity for economic development finally rolled in. He died in 2017, after spending much of his career orchestrating the complex real estate transactions required to the transfer the base itself from the Navy to the City, the deals that eventually brought Touro University, to the closed base and that set the stage for Mare Island's initial reuse. He didn't live to see what may be the wave he long predicted. The opportunity the nation's shipyard infrastructure crisis appears to be presenting right now may very well be that wave.
Two things happened this month that indicate that the wave may finally be about to break on Vallejo’s shores. JLL, the global real estate firm now marketing Mare Island's old shipyard core for The Nimitz Group, announced it's actively courting shipbuilders, defense contractors, and institutional investors to revive shipbuilding and repair on the island, framing it as part of the largest maritime industrial mobilization since World War II. That announcement landed the same week the U.S. Naval Institute published a United States Coast Guard (USCG) officer's case, in his personal capacity, for turning Mare Island into a West Coast maintenance center of excellence. His argument: the USCG has exactly one ship maintenance yard in the whole country, it's in Maryland, and most of the newest cutters are headed to the Pacific anyway. Fine in peacetime, he argues, but in conflict, he warned, "it could lead to strategic failure."
His wasn’t a new idea, a 2024 Proceedings piece made a similar case for a West Coast USCG shipyard two years earlier. But this month’s article is landing in a genuinely different moment: the White House ordered a fifth public Navy shipyard this month, South Korea's three biggest shipbuilders are pouring investment into U.S. shipbuilding capacity (one of them wants to buy an American yard outright), and Congress has bills like SHIPS for America moving to rebuild an industrial base that has been in decline for decades.
The local reaction has been notably open. Mare Island's operating company says it welcomes new partners. Vallejo's city manager says the city has the facilities, the location, and the people to make it work. Rep. Garamendi, who's never stopped pushing for Mare Island, wants to learn more. The Historic Park Foundation's president is cautiously supportive too, “vacant historic buildings only get harder to save the longer they sit empty.”
Al's own numbers tell you why this has taken so long. The Navy's valuation at closure found the property was worth slightly less than nothing once you accounted for the cost of converting a shipyard to civilian use, part of why the developer eventually took it for a nominal sum in exchange for roughly $260 million in infrastructure commitments. The Urban Land Institute called 20 to 30 years a reasonable redevelopment timeline back in 1994. We're 32 years past that prognostication and still awaiting redevelopment. This was not because Mare Island lacked value, but because the same dry docks, waterfront, and heavy industrial infrastructure made it hard to fit into a conventional real estate pro forma; however, they may be exactly what could make it valuable to a government or private client intent on reusing it for its original purpose.
The island's post-closure track record cuts both ways, and it's worth remembering here. Mare Island Dry Dock ran real Navy, Coast Guard, and NOAA overhaul work out of the old graving docks for over a decade, employing as many as 250 to 300 people plus 1,200 contractors at its 2023 peak, genuine proof the yard can still do the work. It also just went bankrupt after losing a single Coast Guard contract to a competing yard, which is close to a textbook illustration of the underlying argument for a government-run yard: a commercial operator's priorities are set by winning bids, not by the service's needs, and one lost contract can take the whole operation down. Go back further and you'll find a scrap contractor that took on the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany in 1995 and walked away two years later, leaving her at the pier for most of a decade, and an art-ship conversion that never got funded and eventually sold for a dollar. Ambition has never been the limiting factor out here.
So can real federal momentum, a capacity problem the congress, the President the Coast Guard and the private sector are all naming coupled with real local buy-in overcome a 30-year record of good intentions running into the sheer cost and complexity of the place?
Al spent a career telling people the job was to be ready when the wave came. Whether that wave has finally arrived and if Mare Island can catch it remains to be seen.
