Aroostook County officials launch effort to save DFAS center, jobs

LIMESTONE – Aroostook County officials wasted no time Monday organizing for the months-long fight facing them to save the 362 jobs at the Limestone Defense Finance and Accounting Service center.

Early Monday morning supporters at the Northern Maine Development Commission were initiating plans for the fight. The meeting of the Aroostook Partnership for Progress dealt entirely with the DFAS problem.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced Friday that the Limestone DFAS center was on the hit list that will be reviewed by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission between now and Sept. 8 when a final list will be given to Congress for action.

Monday’s session followed a meeting with Gov. John Baldacci and Maine’s entire Washington delegation at the Loring Commerce Centre Sunday night.

“We will be meeting on a regular basis,” Walt Elish, executive director of the APP, said Monday afternoon. “We talked about initial plans and who else should be at the table. We will be relying on a lot of people in this,” he said. “We will be working on this pretty steady between now and September.”

Elish and Carl Flora, president and CEO of the Loring Development Authority, will head the group. Elish said they already have a large group of people offering help.

“We have no time to waste,” Elish said. “Time will go by fast and we need to have everything in place, and that’s the plan.”

The move to realign DFAS centers by the DOD took everyone by surprise. It had been believed the realignment would include only military bases.

For Loring, the announced closure of DFAS is the second hit in 11 years by the DOD. In 1994 the former Loring Air Force Base was closed. It took the Loring Development Authority all that time to bring some 1,300 civilian jobs to the center. On Friday, the DOD proposed eliminating 25 percent of those jobs.

No one knows why the Pentagon called for closure of the center, which has garnered award after award for the work ethic of its employees and for doing work at the lowest cost across the system.

While the Defense Department listed 241 people working at Limestone DFAS, the number is actually 362.

The governor told nearly 100 people Sunday night at the Applied Technology Facility at the LCC that the state has hired a consulting firm to fight all cuts proposed in Maine, including the DFAS center. Baldacci promised an all-out effort to prevent the closures.

The Loring Development Authority estimated that the annual payroll of the facility, where jobs average $32,000 to $35,000 per year, amounts to between $11 million and $12 million.

The facility is located in the former Air Force base hospital. The $28 million facility was built in 1988, six years before the base closed. In the last three years, $6 million in renovations have been undertaken at the facility.