Bill Clinton: “Well, let's back up a minute. The Congress appropriated this money months and months and months ago. There was a big…”

“Well, let's back up a minute. The Congress appropriated this money months and months and months ago. There was a big debate, and the previous administration basically didn't believe that this was a big problem, so they never released any of the money. In the last few weeks, we have worked very hard to put together a plan that would release over $1 billion this year in defense conversion. In addition to that, let me just say, apropos of the Connecticut economy specifically, if the Congress passes the stimulus plan that I have recommended to try to jumpstart the economies of the States with high unemployment rates, Connecticut should receive about $118 million, just out of the stimulus package, in funds for community development block grants and Federal highway construction and clean water and clean drinking water efforts and urban transit money. So all that will be coming into the State, and obviously that will create a lot of jobs. Some of those jobs will be created in the same areas where the defense jobs have been lost. Now, to go back to your original question, we're going to move the job training money, the community assistance money, and the new technology money as quickly as we can. By and large, in most States there is a retraining infrastructure which will accommodate it. The infrastructure we need to create, frankly, is to make sure there's a good partnership between the Defense Department, the Commerce Department, and all the other Federal Agencies and communities, so that communities can take money and begin immediately planning to generate new jobs. And we need a better partnership between the Government and the private contractors to make sure that they have as much lead time as possible to plan to put new technologies into effect or to take their defense technologies and convert them into commercial products. I'm sure all of you saw the press when I went to Baltimore to the Westinghouse plant. To assist in that regard, we're going to do two things. First, we've got all the Federal Agencies involved to put together a book which can be made available to every defense contractor in America, which shows the resources and the efforts that can be made by the Advanced Re- search Products Agency, the Commerce Department, the Energy Department, which controls the Federal labs where a lot of this research is done, the Defense Department, NASA, and others. Secondly, we're going to go out across the country now and hold meetings that are literal workshops for defense contractors to try to get them involved in this process before the contracts run out. The thing that has bothered me about this all along is that these contracts have been canceled, and then someone comes along and says, well, why don't you think of something else to do? So what we're going to try to do is to develop an ongoing relationship with defense contractors which will permit them to plan for conversion, even as they're still producing whatever products they're contracted to produce by the Defense Department. And this whole thing has to be coordinated in a much more disciplined fashion than it has been in the past. And that's why I've set up this defense conversion group, to do. Let me just make one other point, since the Department of Defense yesterday announced another round of base closings and realignments, which would be modest compared to the contracting losses you've had. There would be a reduction of 2200 jobs in Connecticut around the submarine operations. Here is the dilemma for us--and I want to just put that out here so you will be able to evaluate what happens in the future. We've had two rounds of base closings so far. They've been fairly modest. And this announcement from the Pentagon was pretty big. And there will be another one in 1995. Keep in mind, all these bases that were on that list, even if the commission approves them for closing or realignment, they won't be closed for 3 to 5 years. That gives us real time to plan, if we do it. If we really have an aggressive plan, it gives us time to plan the futures of the men and women in uniform who may be mustered out. It gives us time to plan for the futures of the communities and the civilian employees. Let me ask you to consider what happens when you don't do this. On the plan we're on now, if we don't close any more bases, we will have by 1997 reduced defense by 40 percent, personnel in uniform by 35 percent, overseas deployments by 56 percent, and base structure by 9 percent. Now, what does that mean to Connecticut? It means that if you--because of the incredible difficulty of closing domestic bases, it means if you don't close any of them and you have this defense budget going down, that means more reductions in contracts. It means it hurts the plants and where the high-tech production is done even more. One of the reasons that we have to close some more bases is, with a reduced Armed Forces at the end of the cold war, we have got to maintain a very, very high level of technological superiority and military readiness, which means we still are going to have a very significant amount of military contracts out there in high technology areas. But you could argue that over the long run, the States that have a lot of the plants that do this work, like Connecticut, California, and others, would be better off if we can exercise the discipline to close the bases in a way that is humane and fair and economically advantageous. So that's what we're trying to do. Sea Wolf Submarine Program”