Irvine to Help Turn Swords Into Plowshares

The city of Irvine has been awarded a $71,000 Pentagon grant to develop a model program showing ways in which defense contractors can shift their work from military to civilian enterprises, it was announced Tuesday.

The grant is part of a program conceived a year ago when international tensions were easing and the federal government was beginning to make major cuts in defense spending. The idea was to look for new uses for military bases being closed and to help aerospace firms find work other than building new weapons systems.

Irvine’s plan envisions wooing aerospace companies to play a major role in ambitious mass transit projects being discussed by the city of Irvine and by Orange County. The program is aimed at convincing the aerospace sector and other firms linked to defense to shift their expertise to projects such as proposed monorail and people-mover systems, said Margo Bowers, who will oversee the one-year project.

The program will also establish the Institute for Entrepreneurial Development, an advisory group of public and private leaders from banking, academe, industry and business that will recommend ways in which defense contractors can participate in transit projects.

Bowers, whose salary and expenses will absorb nearly all of the grant money, said her goal is to show “how well we can attract ordinarily defense-type firms into a public project. A huge percentage of business conducted in the L.A. Basin is, in one way or another, military-related. More and more businesses are closing and more and more people are out of work.”

The grant was the brainchild of former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, who embraced the notion of “economic conversion,” the phrase used for shifting America’s reliance away from defense to civilian enterprises.

Agran, who was out of town and unavailable Tuesday for comment, has envisioned using the city’s $250-million monorail proposal to create a local mass-transportation industry using defense companies now undergoing layoffs and cutbacks.

In its efforts to help communities trying to adapt to changes in military spending, the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Adjustment issues the grants from a $3.5-million fund and provides technical aid.