Published November 1993 — Download PDF of the original newspaper column
Byrd's-Eye View By U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd Another Building Block for 21st Century West Virginia
For more than a century, West Virginia's economy -- the engine that created jobs for our parents and grandparents and underwrote the way of solid family life and spiritual values that distinguish our state nationwide -- has rested on heavy manufacturing and natural-resource extraction. Since the 1950's, however, a number of factors -increased international competition, emerging high technologies, changing energy demands, and automation, to name a few -- have combined to reduce job opportunities in our state and forever alter West Virginia's industrial base. Sensing such changes, some years ago, I conceived the vision of a 21st century West Virginia that would enjoy the dividends of a 21st century economy. My vision for West Virginia comprises a diversified economy that frees us from the perennial boom-or-bust dilemmas of the past -a diversified economy that includes improved highways, increased opportunities in tourism, improved education, better health care for our citizens, expanding high-technology and research enterprises, and broader job prospects for our young people. In pursuing that goal, for example, I am helping to put into place in north central West Virginia an important aerospace community that will tie our state's future into the dawning, international space age, and that will make West Virginia 1t leader among the Middle Atlantic states in the aerospace industry. Toward that end, I added approximately $5.1 million in federal funds to make possible the construction of the National Aerospace Education Center at Benedum Airport in Harrison County, which I recently helped to formally dedicate. Operated under the auspices of Fairmont State College, this facility will instruct up to 120 students per year in airplane maintenance and repair, making West Virginia the training nucleus of an occupation in which a reported 4,000 positions go unfilled each year. Further, I worked with Congressman Alan Mollohan in recruiting the Grumman Corporation's fabrication and assembly plant to join in an expanding complex of such corporate neighbors as Pratt and Whitney, the Lockheed plant in Clarksburg, and others who have caught, or will catch, the vision of West Virginias growing future in the aerospace industry. In the years ahead, I shall continue working to diversify West Virginia's economy, to assure a more abundant future for people in all sections of our state. November 24, 1993