On the recordMay 25, 2011
The question involves the Avondale shipyard-- which used to be Northrop Grumman, it is now a part of Huntington--and there are essentially three possibilities of what might happen to the shipyard. One possibility is that we leave the shipyard there to build ships for the Navy. The trouble is that we don't have enough demand or we don't have enough money to buy the ships that we would need to keep that shipyard busy, which then means that we are trying to build ships at a lot of locations where we don't have enough ships to get any economic benefits. The result of that is it is going to cost the taxpayer and the Navy a whole lot more money to keep a shipyard open when we don't really have work for the shipyard. So that's one possibility. You could force it to stay open; it's going to cost the most to the taxpayer. Another possibility is that the shipyard, because of the many people that work there, could be retooled and redesigned to use it for building other kinds of things other than Navy ships. That would preserve the jobs. And the Navy is willing to invest some money--as long as it is less than what it would cost to keep the thing open. They're willing to invest some money to help with that transition so those people won't be unemployed. The other thing that could be done is you could just close the shipyard down. Now, what this amendment does is it says, well, we're not going to allow the Navy to invest in retooling.…
