Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to report the correct first name of El Segundo Mayor Suzanne Fuentes, which was was misspelled.

The Los Angeles Air Force Base is home not to bombers and fighter jets but to thousands of engineers and contract administrators who dole out billions of dollars for satellites and other hardware built throughout Southern California.

But now, as talk of another round of base closings sweeps through Washington, local officials and business leaders fear the El Segundo installation could be closed or relocated, potentially costing the region billions of dollars in defense contracts and 6,000 jobs. And they are mobilizing to keep the base open.

As part of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal released last week, the Defense Department asked Congress for a round of base closures, beginning in 2017. The base narrowly escaped the last round a decade ago, thanks to some creative maneuvering, but now there is concern it could be at the top of the list should closings and consolidations go forward.

To combat that threat, members of the Los Angeles County Business Federation, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and representatives for the local aerospace industry are launching a preemptive strike, lobbying California’s congressional delegation and Pentagon officials to keep the base off any closure or consolidation lists.

“The tech jobs at Los Angeles Air Force Base have become one of the anchors for our technology community,” said David England, executive vice president of the Business Federation, or BizFed, a group of 130 business associations representing 268,000 companies. “This has evolved over time as Silicon Beach has developed, so that now the base is more integral than ever before to the region’s tech economy.”

England said that BizFed member groups will be emailing or writing key members of Congress, the Department of Defense and other important parties in coming weeks.

Local elected officials have also moved swiftly to drum up support for the base. The issue came up at Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s roundtable of local mayors. And Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, who represents the South Bay area where the base is located, pushed through a motion before the Board of Supervisors calling on local elected officials and members of the California congressional delegation to squelch any move to put the base on a closure or consolidation list.

“I’m calling on them to make sure the base stays where it belongs, in El Segundo,” Knabe said. “We need to make noise now instead of sitting back and waiting for the base to appear on some list and then scrambling to mobilize.”

Knabe pointed to a recent Air Force Magazine article that said the Air Force has determined it has 24 percent more real estate around the nation than it needs. He said he is most concerned about a move to consolidate bases.

“If the desire is to consolidate operations, then it’s very easy to see the Air Force relocating the operations at this base to other bases with more substantial infrastructure,” he told the Business Journal last week.

Los Angeles Air Force Base has no runways, jets or housing facilities. Instead, it’s essentially an office park, something easily replicated elsewhere.

Specifically, Knabe said he has heard that Colorado lawmakers have been eyeing the base as a target for consolidation, arguing that the contracting functions could be done at Air Force bases in that state.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, is on the House Armed Services Committee that will have the most say on whether a new round of base closings goes forward, and, if so, which bases would be on the list. Lamborn’s district includes three Air Force bases and two Air Force Command centers, making it the leading candidate for the Los Angeles Air Force Base to be consolidated into.

Given their numbers in the House, Republicans are now more dominant than at any time in the last 50 years on that committee. And Republicans have no reason to do any favors for California, dominated by Democrats.

Higher risk?

Also, because much of the low-hanging fruit among Air Force bases have already been consolidated in past rounds, the prospect of another round puts even more pressure on remaining bases.

“Base closings now become more focused as the easier bases have already been consolidated,” said Dennis Kenneally, a retired Army major general who now serves as executive director of the Southwest Defense Alliance, a non-profit formed to preserve and enhance defense missions and assets in the Southwestern United States.

If the Los Angeles Air Force Base were to be closed, it could have devastating effect on the local economy, local officials say.

“It’s really the jobs engine for the entire South Bay,” said El Segundo Mayor Suzanne Fuentes. “If the base were to close, some of the contractors ringing the base could shift their own operations elsewhere.”

Fuentes works for one of those contractors, Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Redondo Beach Space Park, which makes satellites and other hardware. And Fuentes herself has worked on several of the contracts that have come out of the Los Angeles Air Force Base.

She said a big reason the base survived the last round of consolidation in the mid-2000s was a land swap. The base had been located in aging buildings in nearby Hawthorne, but local officials convinced the Defense Department and Congress to sell that land and move the base to El Segundo. The sale proceeds were used to pay for a new 545,000-square-foot office campus on the El Segundo base site.

Closing a brand-new facility didn’t make much sense, helping keep the base off the closure list, Fuentes said.

But, she noted, “we don’t have that option this time.”

Still, base closures aren’t a sure thing, as Congress could prove unwilling to authorize another round of consolidation. According to the article in Air Force Magazine, the last three rounds of consolidation since the mid-1990s have cost roughly $29 billion to implement and are generating only about $1 billion a year in savings, not much of a return on investment.

But should base closings be authorized, one factor that could hurt the Los Angeles Air Force Base’s chances of survival is the exit last year of longtime Congressman Henry Waxman. The base is in his old district, which is now represented by freshman Rep. Ted Lieu.

“Base closing is a very political process,” BizFed’s England said. “And as a member with high seniority, Waxman had the clout to do the horse trading necessary to make sure that the base never got on a closure list.”