THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 15, 1995 TAG: 9507150337
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
NASA's Langley Research Center will not close, two congressmen told hundreds of concerned employees at the center Friday afternoon.
U.S. Representatives Herbert H. Bateman and Robert C. Scott condemned a House subcommittee recommendation to close Langley and two other facilities.
``Be not ye afraid. Langley Research Center is going to endure,'' said Bateman.
Bateman, a Republican, and Scott, a Democrat, spoke from the stage of the H.J.E. Reid Conference Center's auditorium. Almost 700 employees filled the seats, lined the walls and spilled out the doors into the lobby.
The congressmen said Virginia's representatives from both parties would work together to kill the proposal. They said they hope the idea will be struck down Tuesday, when the House's full appropriations committee meets.
``I believe we can get this off the table,'' Scott said. But he cautioned that the idea could grow if it's not attacked quickly. ``We're not taking anything for granted.''
U.S. Sens. John W. Warner, a Republican, and Charles S. Robb, a Democrat, could not attend but sent statements of support.
Scott and Bateman said they'll be aided by the delegations from the home states of the other threatened facilities: Maryland, home of Goddard Space Flight Center; and Alabama, home of Marshall Space Flight Center. They said there seems to be no support for the cuts among other members of Congress.
Scott said aeronautics is the only U.S. manufacturing industry that enjoys a favorable balance of trade. Langley is needed to help America keep its edge in that area, he said.
The congressmen alluded to the politics that they said lie behind Tuesday's surprise announcement of the subcommittee proposal. They said it was cruel to make so many workers suffer stress and uncertainty for a political gambit.
Bateman has said that the proposed cuts were a cry for help from the subcommittee, which is charged with allocating funding for, among other things, NASA, the Veterans Affairs Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He said the subcommittee needs more money for its various agencies, including NASA. The proposed closures, he said, were the subcommittee's way of making that point.
``That is the objective that (Republican subcommittee Chairman) Jerry Lewis, bless his misguided head, is trying to accomplish,'' said Bateman.
``I would say in his defense that he has gotten their attention.''
However, the subcommittee also recommended moving some of the functions of the closed centers to facilities near the districts of Lewis, in California, and the ranking Democrat, Louis Stokes of Ohio. That suggestion, said Bateman and Scott, was a mistake.
A NASA employee sparked laughter when she asked Republican Bateman: ``Is there any talk in the speaker's office . . . that (Lewis) be removed?''
No, Bateman answered, laughing, but he said the Republican leadership wasn't pleased. ``I would say he has not found any new favor.''
``I pretty much saw it as a political ploy from the very beginning,'' said Jerry Park, a programming analyst who attended the meeting. ``Not to say it couldn't have been a dangerous political ploy.''
His colleague, Chuck Jackson, also a programming analyst, has worked at Langley for 23 years.
NASA announced a few months ago that it would pare about 200 civil servants and 800 independent contractors from the Langley payroll by the year 2000. There are about 4,500 jobs there now.
Employees here don't take talk of cutbacks lightly, the men said.
Even so, said Jackson, ``I'm not really angry (at Lewis) because I don't think, quite frankly, he's going to be successful. I don't see a major threat.'' ILLUSTRATION: Reps. Herb Bateman and Bobby Scott reassure almost 700 Langley
Research Center employees who attended a meeting about budget cuts
affecting the NASA center. ``Be not ye afraid. Langley Research
Center is going to endure,'' Bateman said. Bateman and Scott said
there seems to be no support for the cuts among other members of
Congress.
VICKI CRONIS
Staff
by CNB