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vienna State rep, Ohio House speaker discuss funding options for project at air base
By Ed Runyan
vienna
State Rep. Sean O’Brien, who participated in a Wednesday meeting about funding for a military deployment hub at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport with Cliff Rosenberger, speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, says he still believes the project will move forward.
“We will come up with a solution to this, whether it’s next month or some other time in the near future,” he said.
O’Brien, of Bazetta Township, D-63rd, said the proposal is “important to the [Mahoning] Valley” because it would help bolster the relevance of the Youngstown Air Reserve Station, which shares facilities with the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport.
The Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber has in recent months joined with the Western Reserve Port Authority, which runs the airport, to create the Eastern Ohio Military Affairs Commission, whose goal is to focus on ways to improve the chances that the air base will survive the next round of military cuts.
Col. James Dignan, commander of the 910th Airlift Wing at the Youngstown Air Reserve Station at the base, and others believe establishing a deployment hub on the 13-acre cargo apron and 25,000-square-foot building on the west side of the airport will increase the viability of the base.
Under the proposal, the apron and building would be used to deploy troops to their theater of operations from all branches of the military from Northeast Ohio, western Pennylvania, northwestern New York and nearby parts of West Virginia.
A proposal was offered during the state capital budget process to pay the $1.2 million cost to purchase the building for the Air Force, which then would pay to equip and operate the facility. The funding was not approved.
Dignan, Port Authority Chairman Ron Klingle and others met with Rosenberger to see if there is another way to fund the purchase.
O’Brien said the project was No. 1 on his list of submissions because the air base is the third-largest employer in the Mahoning Valley.
“I think it was productive,” O’Brien said. “We got a commitment from the speaker to continue to work with us.”
Klingle said Thursday that Rosenberger offered some “good thoughts on how [funding] could be done differently,” though Klingle said he can’t talk about specific suggestions that were discussed.