Supervisors Ask U.S. for Job Funds : Employment: Bush officials give delegation a mixed reception. County is seeking help from Washington to retrain aerospace workers.
Three Los Angeles County supervisors met Thursday with top White House officials and Southern California lawmakers to lobby for creation of a national program to use defense savings to retrain aerospace workers and retool defense firms in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The supervisors--Democrat Ed Edelman and Republicans Mike Antonovich and Deane Dana--got a mixed reception from Bush Administration officials and members of Congress who represent parts of Los Angeles County.
The trio and various aides were here for their annual visit to see senior Administration officials and lawmakers. The trip was given greater urgency by the release Tuesday of a report predicting that Los Angeles County could lose hundreds of thousands of jobs and $2.27 billion in local tax collections and suffer other serious problems. On Thursday, an author of the report said there could be up to 368,000 jobs lost in Los Angeles County; the 420,000 figure in the report included projected job losses throughout the state.
“The aerospace cuts would devastate the Los Angeles County tax base,” Edelman told eight lawmakers at a Capitol Hill luncheon. “It would devastate in human terms--people’s lives, people’s families and people’s security. . . . How are we going to finance county government?”
At the White House, Edelman said, he urged White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner to support a program to redirect 5% to 10% of the so-called peace dividend from defense savings “to help those industries and those communities that are impacted the hardest.”
Edelman said Skinner replied that the Administration is unwilling to revise the 1990 budget agreement with Congress that prohibits money earmarked for defense from being shifted to non-defense programs. House Democrats have sought to change the rule so that billions of dollars formerly spent on defense could be diverted to domestic needs.
“Once you open up the ‘fire wall,’ everyone else will try to get the peace dividend money for their needs,” Edelman quoted Skinner as saying. “They’re afraid of a raid on the Treasury.”
The “fire walls” divide government spending into different categories so that money allocated in one area, such as the military, cannot be switched to another.
Antonovich said he suggested that the White House consider whether to fund the retraining within the defense budget--thereby removing the need to breach the fire wall. “They’re going to explore that,” he said.
A White House official characterized the hourlong session as “a good, frank discussion.” He confirmed that Skinner told the supervisors that the Administration will not support changing the budget agreement to shift defense savings to job retraining.
Meanwhile, members of the congressional delegation appeared divided over Edelman’s proposal. Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles) asked Edelman to supply lawmakers with a detailed plan. Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) and Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles) said that they are working on their own defense conversion legislation.
But Reps. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) indicated that they back retention of the ban on shifting defense funds to domestic programs.
“I was just in the (former) Soviet Union three weeks ago,” Dornan said. “We are still in a very dangerous situation.”
Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) cautioned the supervisors “that as we begin tearing the walls down, as you describe, that we don’t destroy the foundation upon which the walls were built.”
At the same time, the 45-member California delegation appears to agree that some effort is needed to cushion the post-Cold War blow to the defense-dependent state. The delegation has been criticized by some business leaders for not doing enough to keep aerospace firms from leaving the state.
The California Institute--a bipartisan think tank founded last year to foster cooperation among the diverse and often fractious delegation--has found in a survey of the lawmakers that they consider the impact of lower defense spending to be the state’s foremost economic issue.
“The whole question of what will happen to the economic health of California as a result of defense downsizing is probably the top issue that we should help out with,” said executive director Janet Denton.
“We’re going to try to figure out if we can help with job training ideas,” said Denton, who will present the survey’s findings at an April 14 board meeting in Sacramento. “We’re going to try to help with research on which kind of industries could most use the technical expertise that comes out of defense.”
