Defense Secretary William Perry has delayed the release of a report that could hurt the future of Hill Air Force Base.
Perry was to give to Congress last week a report that suggests much of the work now done by air logistics centers, like the one at Hill, be transferred to the aerospace industry.The base would lose 9,000 of its 16,000 employees if that happened, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said this week. He called Perry last Friday, the day the report was due, to complain about its recommendations.
"(Perry) agreed that it was just a report and said that he would take time to look it over," Hatch said. "I think he's leaning toward keeping competition."
If Perry does reverse the report's recommendations - encouraging Congress to base Department of Defense depot work on competition between the depots and the industry, Hill would profit, even grow, Hatch said.
The base has won nine of the last 13 such competitions, bringing more than $111 million worth of contracts to the Ogden Air Logistics Center and saving hundreds of jobs.
Hatch and a private group working to keep the base open thought they had convinced most Pentagon officials to keep depot work based on competition.
Last week's news of the task force recommendations angered them.
"It's mostly just an emotional argument. It seems ridiculous to subsidize private industry to do this work when they'll make $105 billion next year without it," said Mike Pavich, a retired major general who is president of Hill/DDO '95, the private group working to save the base. The Defense Department spends about $5 billion a year on depot work.
Pavich said aerospace companies aren't equipped to do the kind of work military depots now complete. At Hill, for example, workers repair the mainframes of F-16 and FA-18 fighters, work that companies like Grumman would have to build facilities to complete.
The task force interim report was also fraught with intraservice politics, Pavich said.
"The Army and Navy essentially ganged up on the Air Force because they think the Air Force hasn't taken its fair share of downsizing," he said. "The Air Force has some data to prove that they can do the work more efficiently than those two services."
The task force apparently ignored the data, but Congress won't, Hatch and Pavich agreed. Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, already has scheduled hearings on the report next week.