Concord and the Navy are playing a serious game of political chicken over the 5,000-acre Concord Naval Weapons Station.

The Navy is insisting the city meet a Sept. 20 deadline to select a development plan and craft a deal for the provision of facilities for the homeless or it will strip Concord of its federal status as the lead planning agency for the mothballed base.

The feds say they have a schedule to keep.

They must comply with federal environmental laws before cleaning up the base and selling the land, and they say they can't start the analysis until the city finishes the job it promised to do in the time frame it promised to do it.

"We want to get this property off our books," said Department of Defense Deputy Undersecretary Wayne Arny. "It's costing us money to maintain it, money we could be using to buy airplanes and personnel."

Concord calls the Navy's refusal to grant a one-year planning extension retaliatory and its talk of a tight time line laughable.

It has been just 16 months since the Navy declared the land surplus, they say, a mere blip in a historically contorted base closure process that has dragged out a decade or longer elsewhere.

Calling the Navy's bluff, Mayor Bill Shinn vowed to proceed under the city's own timetable — and with its own money, if necessary — and select a final plan by June 2009.

"Why is there a rush to all of a sudden to shortcut

a public process that we have laid out in public hearing after hearing?" Shinn said. "We made a commitment to the community to hold an open, participatory process. We will not be intimidated."

OK, let's call off the dogs and ask the obvious question: What's really going on here?

The truly Machiavellian observers out there say Concord is (A) stalling until after the Nov. 4 re-election campaigns of Shinn and Councilman Mark Peterson so the men don't have to defend potentially controversial votes or (B) running out the clock on Arny, a political appointee in the President George W. Bush administration.

More to the point, the city and the Navy seem to get on about as well as President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Hostilities erupted in early 2007 after Concord learned the Navy was considering bypassing the city and selling the shuttered base — eight square miles in the heart of Contra Costa County — directly to a developer in exchange for $1 billion in military construction elsewhere.

Concord leaders flat out said no when the Navy asked for time to evaluate the idea and publicly accused Arny of sneaking around behind the city's back.

At the time, Concord leaders promised the city could adopt a land-use plan by June 2008 and satisfy the Navy's urgent quest to rid itself of a base it hadn't used in years.

The city's timetable expanded after it decided to embark on a full environmental analysis of seven development options for the property before selecting a final reuse plan.

The Navy is not happy. It does not want a detailed plan, is not legally required to have one and has repeatedly told the city as much.

"The city's seven alternatives are variations of the same theme," Arny said. "The city could pick one of them and tell the citizens that it isn't the final plan but that the Navy needs a broad plan."

Arny may be right, but for the City Council, it's an engraved invitation to a recall party.

The public would revolt if, midway through a promised public process outlined as part of California's well-established environmental law, the council shipped the Navy "The Plan We Think Is Close to What We Will Eventually Approve."

Initially, the public won't see much of a difference if Concord loses its federal status.

Concord will keep doing its thing. The Navy will write its own reuse plan. A federal housing agency will take over the negotiations with advocates for the homeless.

In the end, Concord holds the trump card.

Ideally, the Navy hopes to sell the property at top dollar, which is determined largely by zoning. Land designated for housing or an office, for example, fetches a lot more money than a park.

The feds have no jurisdiction over zoning; land-use authority rests almost solely with cities and counties. (Technically, the base is outside Concord but within its official planning area.)

That means Concord has the final say over what happens there no matter what the Navy puts in its reuse plan.

But as Californians have seen in protracted battles over former military bases such as Treasure Island and Hunter's Point, an adversarial relationship between the military and the community could drag out a resolution for years and siphon resources from the creation of an innovative plan.

This is bad news for everybody, especially the nation's taxpayers, who own this property and are paying the bill — $3 million and counting — for the planning.

The stakes are even bigger for Contra Costans.

The long vacant base is the largest undeveloped parcel under planning review in the East Bay since the county approved the 11,000-home Dougherty Valley. Development decisions there will profoundly affect everything from open space to traffic to new jobs and the housing supply.

Emissaries from U.S. Rep. George Miller's office are to meet with city officials Monday.

Let's hope they can apply the brakes before this political showdown ends in a nasty collision.

Reach Lisa Vorderbrueggen at 925-945-4773, lvorderbrueggen@bayareanewsgroup.com or www.ibabuzz.com/insidepolitics.