Oral History Program Jim Sutton Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 6 April 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jim Sutton Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 6 April 2021 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Hill/DDO’95 oral history project documents the 1995 and 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process and its impact on Utah. In 1993, rumors started to circulate that Hill Air Force Base and Defense Depot Ogden (DDO) would be closed by the 1995 round of BRAC, causing state officials, local government, and local grassroots lobbying group, Hill/DDO’95, to spring into action to save Utah’s military installations from closure or realignment to other facilities. This project includes interviews from a wide range of players, from congressmen, state officials, members of Hill/DDO’95, and the civilian employees of Hill Air Force Base and (DDO). Their accounts describe the process of fighting for the base, the closure of DDO, the formation of the Utah Defense Alliance (UDA) and Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) from the Hill/DDO’95 group, and their fight to save Hill Air Force Base all over again in 2005. Also discussed is the importance of the F-35 aircraft and the “Falcon Hill” Enhanced Use Lease project to the prosperity of Hill Air Force Base and military relations in Utah. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sutton, Jim, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 6 April 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Jim Sutton. It was conducted on April 6, 2021 at the Northrop Grumman offices in Clearfield, Utah. Sutton discusses his position as the director of Plans and Programs at Hill Air Force Base during the 1995 round of Base Realignment and Closure. Sutton also discusses the inception and development of the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA), Falcon Hill, and Hill Air Force Base’s Enhanced Use Lease Program. The interviewer is Alyssa Kammerman. Also in the room is Sarah Langsdon. JS: I served active duty as a lawyer. I was the Staff Judge Advocate to the base, and when I retired in 2000, I decided two things: One, I didn't want to practice law anymore. Two, I wanted to stay in the area. So, Tom Miner, who was the Executive Director at Hill Air Force Base at the time, asked me to come back and apply for the job as the Plans and Programs Director on the base as a civilian. I did, and he picked me for the job, and that was that. So, you know, there was no other magic to it other than that. Having been here for three years, I was a familiar face and expressed a desire to stay and that sort of thing. The job happened to be open, so it worked out. The job was interesting. Traditionally, the concept of a Plans and Programs job is—Most military organizations have different types of plans, so the planning organization manages the development, execution updates, and modifications of those plans. Of course, you know, we all laugh because the old saying is “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” You plan for all of these things, and you have to do that because you have to figure out what resources you think you're going to need and get them together and stuff like that. But the reality of it is that it's more about just trying to think about the future and think about the consequences of things happening. 1 The programming side of it is actually taking the needs of the organization and pulling it into a set of resource requirements that you then communicate through the planning process, the budgeting process that flows all the way up that becomes the Program Objective Memorandum or the POM. They used to call it the PPBS system, which is Planning Programing Budgeting System. There's a new term that they use for it now, but it all means the same thing. It's essentially collecting requirements at the grassroots level and then flowing it up through a system of vetting that ultimately results in a program for the Air Force and a program for DOD, and ultimately a program for the federal government of how taxpayer dollars are expended. It's trade-offs and priorities. You never have enough money to do all the things that you want so you have to have some deliberate process of deciding between competing opportunities. Where do you invest and where do you not invest? Where do you put people? Where do you not put people? Things like that. That's sort of the basis of the job. What also happened, though, was that there were a number of organizations on the base at the time as we were going through reorganizations that became orphaned. I ended up owning all of the orphaned organizations. So, the Arms Control Office that controls all of the access to the missile storage facilities and the maintenance facilities and things like that, those guys all worked for me. The Base Realignment and Closure process, the whole BRAC dynamic was also part of that organization, and we built the teams and organized the different processes to answer the questions that come out in what's called a BRAC questionnaire. We ended up also picking up the responsibility for doing all business development for the base of new ideas. We owned the military construction 2 program, and it was kind of out of that military construction program that the idea for Falcon Hill was forged. Pilot programs typically are grossly underfunded. The dollars are simply not there to be able to deal with it. If you look at the infrastructure at Hill, especially 20 years ago, there was no way ahead to reset the facilities, and so the Enhanced Use Lease process became the way that we did that. I own that part of the organization as well. There were several other things. Things like the suggestion program. Like I said, anything that did not have a home somewhere else, I got. Then with some of the more forward-thinking pieces of it, like, for example, we built an energy office. Not in the sense of going around and checking thermostats, but rather in a way to try to figure out a way to make energy consumption on the base net zero. How do you get to the point that you produce enough energy to be able to put it back into the system so that you have no power bill? Why is that important? Because if I eliminate the power bill for the maintenance organization, I make their prices better. I make them more competitive and I can win more work. It's those types of things. So, it was what things do you do in order to facilitate the process, or be successful, if you will. AK: Can I ask another question? JS: Sure. AK: So, you mentioned that part of the reason why Falcon Hill was developed is because you saw no way to keep expanding Hill outside of Falcon Hill. Is that correct? JS: Well, no. It was more—If you look at the west side of Hill Air Force Base, when you look at all of those old World War II vintage warehouses, they’re full of asbestos, they're full lead-based paint. They are horribly energy inefficient and they're all 3 chopped up in warehouse-sized facilities that are not really good for work environments for people. There was no way to reset them. You couldn't get the money to build new buildings. What the Enhanced Use Lease process allows you to do is harvest value in exchange for putting the land back in production. So, the land that's on a typical military base is boxed in by the fence, and it's not taxable, it's not used for production, it doesn't generate revenue for the community, it generates nothing. It's just there, it's just part of the base. By building Falcon Hill, what we did was we took six hundred acres of the base and we essentially made it developable by a private developer that they could then rent it out, get money for that. We are a 10% stakeholder in that revenue. So, if there is a $1 million a year lease on a facility in Falcon Hill, $100,000 in that flows back into a capital account in the hands of the government. That money is then used to build facilities for the government folks so that they can tear down the warehouses and put people into nice new facilities. It's also self-perpetuating because the way that Falcon Hill works is the baseline lease is 50 years. That's the overall master lease for the whole area. In addition to that, the developer can then write 50-year leases on individual parcels. So, in year 49 of that 50-year master lease, they could write a lease that would last for 50 years so it's essentially a 100-year deal. What that then facilitates is a perpetual capital account. The money that is gleaned as a result of that private development and leasing continues to flow into the capital account so that about every 50 years, all those buildings that you build brand new can be torn down and you can build new ones. There's no dynamic like that anywhere else in government. Everywhere else you have to stand and wait for somebody to give you taxpayer dollars, military construction money to be able to 4 build a new facility to replace a facility or whatever. But with the Enhanced Use Lease process, it becomes perpetual. It's not novel. We weren't the first people to ever do that. We followed on the heels of the Veterans Administration and then also the Navy had done an Enhanced Use Lease facility on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. There were just some smart people that knew about all of that. It's a common tool in private industry, it just was not common in government. There was no genius in it other than simply applying a kind of lateral thinking to take a different concept and apply it to be able to do this. The advantage that we have here at the base is that we sit just north of a major metropolitan area. We're sitting on a freeway. We have three, soon to be four, freeway exits. It's good developable property. You know, if it were way out in the middle of nowhere out in the West Desert somewhere, it wouldn't be worth much. That's what you kind of have to compromise with those things is to find what's the sweet spot for what you can really use something for and get out of it? So, that's why we did it. That's how it happened, and the result of it you can see it today with all the new facilities being built on the base. Northrop Grumman, as a company and as a major investor in that, we were the first company to invest in the lease on the base. Now you see the facility up by the museum, which is clearly the largest facility up there as well. As a company, we've stayed very committed to it. So, I'm happy. I mean, I got to start it on the one hand and then be part of the company that perpetuates it, on the other hand. So, it's fine. AK: So, were you a part of the Utah Defense Alliance at the time that you started with the Falcon Hill creation? JS: Yes—Well, I was the base ex-officio member. As a government person, you can't be a member of the Utah Defense Alliance, but you can be a participant. So, I went 5 to all meetings and they treated me like a board member. Then when I retired and came to work for Northrop, I became a board member. So, I kind of changed my status as I moved on. Unfortunately, the base, with the reorganization that occurred as a part of the five-sector construct, the base did not stay the course on being committed to UDA and being heavily involved. That was unfortunate. But some of the things that we had to do: for example, the creation of MIDA was something that actually Mike Pavich and I did with Governor John Huntsman. John was in office and we realized that we needed something like a redevelopment authority, so Mike and I went down to see John and sat down with him in his office and talked for about 90 minutes. At the end of it, he looked at me and he said, "Whatever you need, Mike, you take care of it. And Mike, if you have a problem, let me know." We then connected with Stuart Adams and Jerry Stephenson, and the other leadership at the time within the Senate. Shelby Killpack was a major player, big deal in terms of helping us. Got MIDA created, got it funded, got the boards set. It's novel because what we did was, in creating MIDA, we made the board membership all of the interested parties from Weber County and Davis County, as well as the municipalities. They all got a voice. They got the opportunity to participate, become part of the board process. The management of police and fire services, the planning and zoning activities are all done by MIDA, basically on behalf of the municipalities of the counties. If you think about the dynamic of trying to do that where you got two counties competing with each other and six or seven municipalities that are all fighting over everybody who wants to annex this new thing, it's genius. I mean, it just, it worked out. Not mine, but collectively, the organization created something that really, really worked well. I think in the context of the discussion about BRAC, there's one thing you need to understand. That is that there were people that were fearful that the 6 creation of MIDA would set us up for higher risk in BRAC because there was a soft landing from closure, that the community had gotten ahead of it. I never subscribed to that philosophy. I think that, first of all, it misrepresents the BRAC process and the BRAC questionnaires and that sort of thing. The BRAC questionnaires and the questions that are asked and how they're asked and answered, look for bases and communities that are innovative. They look for reasons to keep places open, not reasons to close them. What Falcon Hill actually did was, by creating this capital account and by repurposing the facilities both privately as well as publicly and building new infrastructure and that sort of thing, we created a demand signal for other missions from other bases to move here. So, I always view BRAC as a sword, not a shield. I wanted to use it as an opportunity that when other bases closed that had things that were smart and useful and relevant to our community, that we would reach out to them and politic for them and we would get them. So, we grew in every breadth. The base got bigger every time we had a Base Realignment and Closure action. The same in '95 and also in 2005—we got better as a result of it. Beyond that, with the capital account from MIDA, when there were new basing opportunities, we could raise our hand and say, "We'll take it on and we'll do it. By the way, we'll build the facilities for free. Brand new, not some repurposed little piece of crap place or something like that. We'll give you something nice and new and that your people will like to live in.” When the base commissions came here for like F-35, all the legislators, all the mayors and the City Council people, they all came out to the meetings and they had signs, “We love our base.” You know, I compare that to other places around the United States where people in the communities are trying to throw the military bases out. It doesn't happen here. So, things like MIDA, things like the concept of 7 Enhanced Use Leasing and Falcon Hill gave us one more sword to be able to wield in the growth of the base and the increase in jobs in the community. It was a natural part of that. AK: You mentioned a little earlier that you feel like Hill Air Force Base hasn't been supporting UDA as well as in the past. Do they work with MIDA now instead? JS: Well, there is a MIDA seat for the base, just because that's the way the governance structure was created. We did that so that we would continue to have a voice in how the MIDA processes occur. Remember, when we created MIDA, MIDA was not only about Hill Air Force Base. It was targeted for the Enhanced Use Lease facility and what we wanted to do in Hill, but there are a lot of other military lands in the state of Utah: Fort Douglas, Camp Williams, all of Dugway Proving Ground, the Utah Test and Training Range. There were a whole lot of other ways that we could use the MIDA authority to make better use of military-owned government lands inside the state. The vision was always broader than that. So, we included the Commander from Dugway, we included the Commanding General from Fort Douglas, people from Camp Williams. They used MIDA authority, for example, at Camp Williams, to build the NSA data processing center down there. That was all MIDA-related. A lot of things are MIDA-related, and MIDA has a voice in all of those things. The base's involvement in it was just part of the normal governance process. UDA is a little bit different. Military people tend to be—First of all, they come and go. They tend to be worried politically about the image that is created by their being involved in a “save the base” type activity. They are anxious and fearful that they should be neutral and that they should not necessarily be an advocate the way that a Utah Defense Alliance would be an advocate. As a result of that, you'll see military folks in uniform occasionally go to a MIDA meeting to give a little 8 presentation like, “What's going on in the base?” But day in and day out participating in the meetings, the strategy sessions, the dialog with the lobbyists back in D.C., they run away. They're just scared of their own shadow when it comes to stuff like that. I'm a little different if you haven't already figured that out. I've always felt— and I didn't do it as a military guy when I was a JAG, but as soon as I became a civilian, I became the guy. I walked into Tom Miner and I said, “I think I ought to do this.” Tom got this little boy smile on his face and kind of laughed, and he said, “I was hoping you'd say that.” For him, I was plausible deniability. I could go to the meetings, I could say whatever I wanted to say, and it wasn't attributed back to him or to the base or anything else. Every once in a while, something would get out and Tom would come up in my office and he’d lean on the doorway and look in and he'd say, "You've been talking to Congress again?" I’d look at him and go, "Not me." He goes, "That's what I thought." Turn around and leave. Then he'd go back, call somebody up and say, "No, he hasn’t been talking to Congress. Don't worry about it," and that would be the end of it. But somebody has to do that. You have to have that kind of dialog. It was never about something that was against the Air Force. It was about adding value to the Air Force and making the base be all it could be, and cement it, if you will. But the base's involvement, I had top coat because I worked directly for the executive director. There was nobody really other than the Commander, and the Commander didn't want to hear it. The only Commander that ever wanted to hear it 9 was Rich Roellig. Rich was great. But all the rest: Andy Bush, Condon, and everyone, they're like, “Oh God, no, no, no. I might get shot,” you know. Roellig is like, “Bring it on.” I love Rich. Of all the bosses that I worked for, and I worked for seven of them or something like that, he was lightyears ahead of all the rest of it. He caused trouble. There were people that fussed about him and that sort of thing, but I've also had senior leaders from the base come back to me years later and say, "You know, Roellig was the best commander we ever had." AK: Would you mind if we back up a little bit and talk about BRAC 2005? JS: Sure. AK: So, I wanted to know more about your involvement in BRAC 2005. JS: So, I was actually involved with the BRAC rounds at Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command when we first stood the command up in the 1992 timeframe. There were BRAC rounds—In the old, old days, there was no such thing as BRAC. If the services wanted to close an installation, they just closed the installation. There were installations all across the United States, especially in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War and that sort of thing, that they just closed the gates and walked away from everywhere. As the number of bases dwindled, it began to be a jobs thing, and Congress began to get interested. So, they began to require that the services manage this through some organized process called Base Realignment and Closure. I think that the first round was around 1990, and then there was a brief round in '92. There was a '93 round that threatened the ALCs significantly, and it was ultimately decided to take them off the table, but they came roaring back in '95. It was in '95 that the Air Force decided on this three-depot philosophy, and they decided to close two of the depots. There was big competition between the depots. 10 It set up all kinds of fighting and infighting and frustrations in between the communities of rock-throwing and everything else. In the end, it resulted in the closure of Kelly and the closure of McClellan. Kelly rebounded pretty well in '95. McClellan did not rebound as well. California never really got it. They didn't care as much about McClellan Air Force Base as the folks in San Antonio cared about Kelly. It's just that simple. But Kelly created a redevelopment authority—it's like Port San Antonio or something like that—and they have their own redevelopment action. They've built a lot of buildings in there and they've developed it in a very positive way. Not as much so at McClellan. Hill was initially touted as being the one that was most at risk, but the heavy involvement by Mike Pavich, Vickie McCall, Scott Trundle and a number of others, and you guys have got the names from all the history of all the people who were involved in that. We got the message out well, and it became fairly obvious to the Air Force that the Utah Test and Training Range, the ICBM capabilities, were very important and they were hard to replicate anywhere else—not simple to do. In addition to that, I think the other thing that probably made a difference in BRAC 2005 was: I was involved at the headquarters level in the '92, '93 rounds, and in the lead up to '95. But in '94, I went to Scott and was a staff judge advocate of Scott. So, I was out of that business for three years. From '94 to '97, I wasn't involved. BRAC '95 happened while I was doing that, and then I moved to Hill and took over as the SJ at Hill. So, I moved to a base that had survived. It had survived, but what also happened was we got 3,000 new people moving here as a result of that survival, and we had no infrastructure to support it. That's another reason why things like 11 Enhanced Use Lease and Falcon Hill became important, because it was a way to bed down all these folks that had come as a result of BRAC. There was also a huge problem in both of those rounds in the capturing of manpower, so it became a hiring exercise. I mean, let's say we moved 3,200 people here. In fact, what we did was we moved 2,800 vacancies and 400 real bodies. Now, you are in this environment in Utah, which already has a relatively low unemployment rate, and did even then. You're trying to find highly qualified, technically skilled people to do those jobs that hadn't been done in those other farflung places, and you only captured 10 to 20 percent of the manpower that you needed in order to do it. That was one of the biggest challenges associated with BRAC—that and the facilities pieces. The other problem that we faced in the BRAC move was that a lot of the technical data on the support equipment, on the manufacturing equipment, and the repair equipment, and that sort of thing, was just lost. A lot of these systems were old, and when they turned them off in one place and moved them, when they turned them on in the new place they didn't work, and there was no tech data support. Another problem that occurred is the mechanics that had dealt with this stuff for years, they had developed their own tech data, if you will—their own cheat sheets of how to make this stuff work. When they retired and they walked away, they just took the cheat sheet and threw it in a trash can. The person on the other end gets it, they get the equipment, but they don't know what to do with it. They plug it in, it doesn't work. Now you're trying to reverse engineer all of this and figure out how to get it back up and running. We had workloads that for two or three years we couldn't produce anything because we didn't have the information necessary to be able to make the stuff work again. It was a real challenge. It was on so many different levels: facilities, people, 12 training new hires for the support equipment, brand new processes, trying to make it all up. I got here as the lawyer as we were trying to deal with all of those implementation problems. There were some legal issues associated with it, but mostly it was that type of thing. What I really got involved in, which happened right after I got here, was the public-private competition around the closure of McClellan. What happened was the BRAC decision was made to close McClellan, but the question was would the workload be privatized in place? In other words, would it stay right there in California, which is what some of the Air Force leadership wanted to happen? Or would it be subject to competition? If it were subject to competition, could the depots bid? Congressman Jim Hansen got right in the middle of it and pushed through legislation—it was 10 USC 24 69 A—that mandated this public-private competition process that no one had ever done before. It was a train wreck. It was a disaster, because you were trying to compare apples and oranges. Jim got the statute passed, but then the regulatory implementation of it was very nuanced. In the end, the statute required that there be a competition. The Air Force leadership tried to put their thumb on the scale and preclude us from being effective. They designated Hill as the bidder. They tried to preclude us from being effective in that process by bundling all the work together. The reason that the bundle was a problem was that some of the work that was included in the bundle was KC-135 work. Hill does not have hangars big enough to house KC-135s. So, Rich—this is when Rich Roellig was the Commander—Rich and I sat in his office for hours trying to figure out what's the mechanism by which we're going to be innovative, so that we can build the facilities necessary to be able to house the KC-135 work. We were going to price the MILCON and put it in our proposal so 13 that if our proposal was selected, we would have the MILCON dollars to be able to build the buildings, but they wouldn't let us do it. Over and over again—and this was Darlene Drew—she wouldn't let us do it. One of the provisions that Hansen had put into the public-private competition statute, though, was the ability to partner. So, what we did is we ran a mini competition and we selected Boeing as our partner to do the KC-135 work in the facilities that the Air Force was abandoning at Kelly. So, we ran a competition, we selected Boeing. We did this on the back of the envelope because there was no process for it. There was no mechanism, whatever, for it to occur. We had oral proposals, we had written proposals, they came in and did presentations. Rich and I are sitting in there with a couple of other folks listening to the presentations. We ultimately picked Boeing. A guy by the name of Jim Rustellie was the president of that part of Boeing, and he and Rich became partners. We built a proposal, we put the proposal in, we submitted it. The day that we announced that we had picked Boeing as our partner, the Lockheed guys called Darlene Drew and said, "We're out. The Hill guys have done it the right way. They've done what they need to win and we're going to walk away." Darlene said, "Oh no, you're not,” and she made them propose. We won by $250 million, and the rest is history. Then we had to activate the workloads and bring them in and stuff like that. We took all the 135 work and we gave them to our partner in Boeing, and that was that. But that's how we got through the implementation problems associated with moving that workload. The heroes of that process were people like Rich Roellig— just having a Commander that was willing to just go for it. He was willing to be criticized, he was willing to have people take shots at him, and it didn't matter. He 14 and Darlene were close friends, and after that, they weren't. She did not want that outcome and we made it impossible for the outcome to be any other way. So, it's a cool part of the BRAC '95 story. BRAC 2005 I managed end to end, because I was in XP at the time. Jeanette Bonnell was the manager and she took care of it. 2005 was not a real threat to closure. 2005 was an opportunity and it was a place in which we could grow and bring in new workloads and new capabilities and things like that. That's where things like the whole concept of Falcon Hill became valuable, because it gave us something to talk about. It gave us something that we could work with on being able to bring new capabilities in and build facilities for them without having to take it out of hide or go look for MILCON dollars or something else like that. It was very, I will say, anticlimactic compared to '95—not nearly as much soul searching and wrenching and that sort of thing. There was a little period when there was some question about, would the Air Force move to two depots? That sort of thing. But the Congressman and the Senators talked to the Air Force secretary fairly directly and said, "Look, you guys sold us on the idea that it was a three-depot system. You can't go to a two-depot system now. You have to stay the course," and they did. Hansen was a BRAC commissioner, too, so Hansen made sure that that message carried through from the commissioners as well. There were other things that happened, too—other big issues that occurred and that sort of thing. But the protection of the base as an entity was was, in my opinion, never in doubt. Was that helpful? AK: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. From what we understood from our interview with Kevin Sullivan, he said that the Commissioners didn't come and visit during 2005 like they did in '95. Is that correct? JS: Yeah, they did. 15 AK: Oh, they did? JS: Hansen, Fig Newton. I mean, yeah, we toured them around. Maybe Kevin wasn't here. SL: Was it Tom Miner that said it? JS: Tom was retired. SL: Maybe it was Kevin then. AK: Yeah, because I remember thinking he said that they didn't come in. What they did instead was have you guys write up reports to send to them. Does that ring a bell at all? JS: No, we did. We did. There's a BRAC questionnaire that Jeanette and her team did that was thousands of pages of information that answered all the BRAC questions. We had to fill all that out and then send it in. Once that was vetted, then the commissioners came for a visit. I know the commissioners came. I mean, we did briefings with them. Jim Hansen’s grabbing me by the arm, you know, "Make sure you show them this, make sure you show them that." I mean, no doubt about it. The two commissioners I remember distinctly were Jim and Fig Newton. General Newton, retired Air Force, four-star, African-American, and he was one of the principal commissioners in 2005. We did a thing over in the O-Club where we had a big presentation. Brett Swanson, who used to work for me, actually did the speech. He got up and did the presentation—He was a lawyer, and he got up and did the presentation and all the things that were about the base. There was fanfare in the back and “yay-yay, rahrah.” Then we had individual meetings with them and things like that. But oh yeah, they were totally—I didn't dream that. Sometimes I dream things, but that one I didn't dream. 16 The reason I really remember it is it was one of the last things that Jim did. After he had retired from Congress, and he was kind of sliding, you know, he had a little bit of consulting business stuff and things like that. But when they asked him to be a BRAC commissioner, he was so excited. Had there been another round, the goal was that Jim was going to be the chairman. He was going to run it. I got to be really good friends with Jim through Vicki McCall. He's a great guy. I mean, he was very, very much the most stalwart, staunchest defender of the base ever, far none. Second was really Senator Orrin Hatch. Even though he was not on the Armed Services Committee or on an authorizing committee that was directly related to the base, he was very good about using his position as an influencer on things that had to do with the base. When you needed him, he was there. Falcon Hill would not have happened had it not been for Orrin personally. He picked up the phone and called the Air Force secretary and said, “I need this to be done,” and they did. It was not ready. The CE guys were twisting their arms about it, and they were wringing their hands, and they were concerned, and they didn't know what to do, and this, that, and the other. Bill Anderson, when he was the SAF/IE, reached out and grabbed him by the back of the neck and brought it into his office and signed the document and said, “It's done.” That's how it happened, and it was only because of a personal request from Orrin. So, you know, others like to talk about what wonderful things they've done for the base, Orrin doesn't talk about it. He just does it. He and Jim, they were really, really great. I mean, they're both personal friends, and my daughter worked for Robb and my son worked for Orrin, so. 17 AK: I know we're about out of time and you need to go soon, so I just have two quick questions. The first one is, what do you feel is Hill Air Force Base’s importance to Utah today? JS: I'll go back to something that was created during Governor John Huntsman's administration. When John was governor, he created these economic clusters. We advocated for different clusters, and there were twelve-ish or something like that. Essentially, they were distinct disciplines within the state that were growth vectors. What became Silicon Slopes was an IT cluster. Tourism was a cluster and aerospace was a cluster. There was another cluster that related to advanced materials and advanced material manufacturing that is very related to aerospace. The two of those have an identity that is extremely important to keep together. The keystone of the aerospace economic cluster for the state of Utah is Hill Air Force Base. It drives engineering, it drives technicians, it drives the investment in infrastructure and in equipment. It ties to companies like ours. Now there are 8,000 Northrop Grumman employees in the state because of GBSD. It becomes the economic engine that drives the aerospace cluster. So, as one of the pillars under which Utah's economy resides, the base is there. It's solid. It's important. The other thing that I would say is that because of the high-tech nature of much of the work that goes on in the base, it drives education and importance in STEM. That becomes not just a national issue, but a world issue in terms of the hegemony of the importance of the United States, its ability to compete with China, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those are kind of long threads to pull, but they're there. The base and the surrounding companies that support the base and the community that it lives in are all things that are positive vectors that move and grow that capability. 18 The last thing that I would say is that the base, culturally—men and women in the military and those who are associated with men and women in the military, including the DOD civilians that work here and things like that, and the contractors that support them as well—tend to have very high standards of conduct. They are well disciplined because many of them have to have security clearances. They can't do stuff that just gets them in trouble. So, that group of people, even though they are in many instances not of the dominant faith of the community, are socially aligned in the same way. They value the same things, the same principles. You won't wander around Hill Air Force Base and see many progressives of the ilk of AOC. That is consistent with the communities of Utah that they reside in. I view that as a positive, and the reason I say that is that you end up with this very diverse group of people that, by virtue of the military system, is also very inclusive. You know, look at the faces of people who go to work every day. You have diversity of thought, you have diversity of education, you have diversity of religion, you have diversity of color, race, creed, origin, sex, national, you know, whatever you want to have. But it spills over into the community and becomes part of the fabric of the community of northern Utah. It dominates in just the sheer number of people in northern Utah, but it also remains true to the standards of the community of the state. Ultimately those things are important to me. So, that's kind of how I see it. Does that make sense? AK: Yeah, absolutely. Since we're out of time, I think we'll close there, unless there is anything else that you would like to add. JS: No, I don't think so. If you guys have follow-up questions, just call me. I'm glad we got to do this. AK: We really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. 19