Cutbacks Avoided at Plant 42 With Release of Funds
Plant 42, the Air Force’s 5,700-acre test and production facility here, has won a budget reprieve that will avert a threatened partial closure of the plant’s airfield and layoffs of 51 employees, its commander said Monday.
The release of an extra $1.8 million in funding and the promise by Air Force officials of another $800,000 to $1.1 million next spring should enable Plant 42 to erase a $2.9-million shortfall in its $12-million operations budget, said Maj. Peter Drinkwater.
In May, Plant 42 officials said the projected shortfall was going to force the closure of the facility’s airfield to military flights one-third of each month and layoffs of firefighting and security personnel. But Monday’s funding commitment has now scrapped those plans, Drinkwater said.
“There’s not going to be any cutbacks or any changes. We’re just like we were before,” Drinkwater said. He said the change stemmed partly from senior Air Force officials realizing that the cutbacks would have meant higher costs for such major Plant 42 programs as assembling the B-2 stealth bombers.
For example, the layoffs would have reduced Plant 42’s firefighting crews such that normal weekend engine tests for the bat-winged bombers would have been halted. That would have meant production delays costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, Drinkwater said.
He also credited Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) and top officials with Northrop Corp., the B-2’s prime contractor, and Plant 42’s two other largest contractors, Lockheed Advanced Development Co. and Rockwell International, with fighting to save the facility’s funding.
McKeon, whose office wrote letters and made phone calls to lobby Air Force officials, credited the service’s turnabout to the argument that other programs such as the B-2 would incur delays and added costs. “It was a joint effort. I was happy to be a part of it,” he said.
Plant 42 is one of 12 government-owned plants across the country where contractors work on Air Force programs, but it is the only one of the group with its own airfield. Plant 42 averages about 60,000 aircraft operations annually, many of them training or test flights.
Plant 42’s threatened layoffs of firefighter, security and maintenance workers would have hit employees of Pasadena-based Pacifica Services Inc., one of the county’s largest Latino-owned companies, which has a $12-million-a-year government contract to provide support staff.
That five-year contract is due to expire at the end of March. Drinkwater said a new contract will be awarded after a competition among small business bidders. The current employees probably will continue, but there will be a new contractor since Pacifica has become too large to compete, he said.
