Battle to save air base will require big guns

We would hope by now that every Mahoning Valley resident understands the future of the Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Vienna Township hangs in a balance and that it will take all of this region's political and financial prowess to keep the base off the federal government's 2005 closing list.
But if there is any resident who is under the false assumption that the threat is simply chatter, we would suggest a reading -- or re-reading -- of the front page story in last Sunday's Vindicator headlined "Base Closings -- A major push to redeploy resources."
Here are a couple of paragraphs that should serve as a wake-up call: "With so many competing priorities, defense officials and many analysts say, the stakes involved in a new round of base closings couldn't be higher.
"'It's going to be mother of all base-closure rounds,' said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a conservative Washington policy-research group. 'It's going to close two to three times the capacity of any previous round, and the reason why is simple. [Defense] Secretary Rumsfeld wants to free up as much money as he can for the transformation of the military to the information age, while at the same time he changes the way the military does business."
As many as one-fourth of the nation's 425 military installations could be shuttered over the next few years, according to the story by Knight Ridder Newspapers. According to defense officials and analysts, the move next year would save billions of dollars that the armed services are spending every year to maintain obsolete and unneeded facilities.
Budget needs
That is battleground in which the Mahoning Valley is fighting to keep the air reserve station off the Defense Department's Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) 2005 list. Leading the battle is Save Our Airbase Reservists (SOAR), a coalition of local business, political and union leaders, which has developed a $1 million budget to finance the campaign. Of that, $190,000 has come from the state, while the coalition is raising $225,000 in cash contributions and providing $284,500 in in-kind contributions. SOAR is hoping that the state will come up with $302,500 more since the original grant request was for $492,500.
In his State of the State address last week, Gov. Bob Taft asked the General Assembly to earmark $1 million in new state assistance to local communities to help them market the bases. The air reserve station in Vienna Township is the second-largest military facility in the state. The largest is Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn near Dayton. More than $900,000 has been funneled from the state to Wright to help the community in its battle to keep the base off the closing list.
While we are unwavering in our support of SOAR and the battle to keep the air reserve station open, we were struck by an accompanying story to the one on Sunday's front page. It dealt with a 2001 study by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group that fights wasteful spending, and the Center for Defense Information, an independent organization, of base closings.
The bottom line: Communities that draw up contingency plans in the event that their base is closed often fare better than communities that don't.
It's something for the Mahoning Valley to think about.