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WARREN -- The head of the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber said the president's decision to sign a defense authorization bill of more than $700 billion in Fort Drum, N.Y. -- one of three sites being considered for an East Coast missile defense site along with Camp Ravenna -- is not an endorsement of that military installation for the site, which may or may not be pursued pending the outcome of a Missile Defense Review.
"That was just to support the congresswoman there in her re-election bid. This administration has an affinity for Northeast Ohio, for whatever reason. And we have a lot of persistence, a lot of resources and the workforce necessary to make this defense site work," said James Dignan, president and CEO of the chamber.
The Missile Defense Review began early last year, ordered by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and was slated to be completed before the end of 2017 -- and then by the end of February, and then by the end of May, but still has not been released. The last review was conducted in 2010. In June, during a delegation of local economic development and government affairs officials to Washington, D.C., Dignan said he was told it wouldn't be long until the review was released and a decision made.
"They said we would hear something in the next few weeks. That was in the third week of June and this is the third week into August and we still haven't heard anything," Dignan said.
Voice messages and an email sent Tuesday afternoon to the U.S. Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency inquiring about the status of the Missile Defense Review were not immediately returned.
The review is expected to outline whether the country needs an East Coast site to shoot down enemy missiles, in addition to sites on the West Coast.
When President Donald Trump signed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act on Aug. 13 in Fort Drum, Dignan said he received several phone calls from people concerned that Trump would announce Fort Drum would receive the site.
But, Dignan said, he believes Trump made the announcement there in order to support one of the Republican president's supporters, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, who is running for re-election this year. The district, New York's 21st, was held mostly by Democrats before Stefanik took office in 2015. The district went through several redirecting efforts, moving the boundaries of the district to include more rural parts of New York like the Adirondack Mountains, and eliminating the state's more blue capital district in 2013.
Trump has many supporters in the area around Camp Ravenna that would benefit from the influx of jobs if it is selected for a missile defense site, Dignan said. He said Camp Ravenna is the ideal site, not just because of its sprawling acres in Trumbull and Portage counties, but because the area has a much larger pool of skilled laborers than the areas surrounding Fort Drum, or the Fort Custer Training Center operated by the Michigan Army National Guard.
"When you draw a 60-mile circle around Fort Drum in upstate New York, you have about a little over 1,000, maybe as many as 1,500, certified skilled trade people in a 60-mile radius to build this project that is going to take about two years to build. They are saying there will be about 2,000 total construction jobs there. You go into the western portion of Michigan, they can get about 15,000 skilled trade workers in that area. You draw a 60-mile circle around us, and that reaches up to Cleveland, that reaches into Akron, Canton, Youngstown, even the outer stretches of Pittsburgh, and you have nearly 60,000 skilled trade workers," Dignan said.
The area around Camp Ravenna also has good accessibility to major thoroughfares, the port in Cleveland, solid infrastructure and dependable utilities, Dignan said.
If selected, it is estimated the project would bring in 600 to 800 "rocket scientists and engineers," to the area, Dignan said.
It's estimated the $3.6 billion project would support 2,300 jobs in the region during construction and the facility would employ up to 850 people full-time once the systems is operational. The chamber estimates the project would have a $4.5 billion economic impact on the state.
The bill Trump signed into law at Fort Drum authorizes other efforts to secure the country's missile defense systems. It authorizes $140 million to the Missile Defense Agency for development space sensing projects and the acceleration of hypersonic defense capabilities, and directs the agency to establish a kinetic-energy missile intercept program and to develop a missile defense tracking sensor layer in space.