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Reserve base commander, military-affairs commission outline efforts to promote base
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
The Western Reserve Port Authority got an update from the Eastern Ohio Military Affairs Commission, the group working to put the Youngstown Air Reserve Station in the best position possible to remain open a long time.
The port authority is a partner in the effort led by the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber and is providing money each year to fund it. The port authority, which runs the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport and carries out economic-development projects, shares the airport’s runways with the air base.
Col. James Dignan, commander of the 910th Airlift Wing for nearly three years, told the board the EOMAC is “vital to the Valley.”
When he was commander of an Air Force base in the Seattle area, there was a business group there that “looked after the health and well-being of the military.”
“When I first got here, I realized our base wasn’t as involved in the [Mahoning] Valley as it should have been and vice versa,” Dignan said. “So we started working and ultimately came to John [Rossi, chamber foundation president] and said maybe this belongs in the regional chamber.”
One result of not having a military-affairs council was that people didn’t know enough about what was happening at the base, he said.
“We were at one point 16 airplanes, about $200 million of direct economic impact to the Valley, and now we’re eight planes with about $97 million of economic impact, and that’s huge,” he said.
“And that happened unbeknownst to the business community by and large here in the Valley. How did that happen? Because we didn’t have this kind of advocacy,” he said.
One of the things Rossi and others did when the military commission was created was to speak to the local federal delegation “and saying, ‘Did you realize this was happening in your district?’ They didn’t, I kid you not. They did not, not one of them.”
Dignan also talked to the board about a possible Air Force regional joint readiness center being created on the west side of the airport in a vacant air cargo building owned by the port authority.
The 25,000-square-foot building, which has an 11-acre cargo apron, could be used to deploy troops to their theater of operations from all branches of the military from the Northeast Ohio, western Pennylvania, northwestern New York and nearby parts of West Virginia.
Such deployments currently take place in one of three places on the East Coast: Dover, Del.; Norfolk, Va; and Charleston, S.C.
For the facility to be used that way, it will require financial assistance from Ohio officials in order to acquire the facility from the port authority.
“We’ve had a number of folks out here from the statehouse. We’ve got support at all levels. We just need to tie it all together,” he told the board. Dignan, who is likely to be reassigned to another base sometime in 2016, said he looks forward to the facility being acquired by the Air Force sometime in 2016.