Oral History Program Rick Mayfield Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 7 April 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Rick Mayfield Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 7 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: Mayfield, Rick, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 7 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 Rick Mayfield. It was conducted on April 7, 2021. Mayfield reflects on Utah’s response to the BRAC process and his role in protecting Hill Air Force Base and other military installations. As a Director of Business and Economic Development under Governor Leavitt, Mayfield helped form the defense Conservation Team and later contributed on the creation of the Utah Defense Alliance (UDA) and the Military Instillation Development Authority (MIDA). He also discusses the importance of political and community support, and strategies to strengthen Utah’s military infrastructure and economy. The interviewer is Alyssa Kammerman. Also in the room is Sarah Langsdon. AK: Today is April 7, 2021. We are speaking with Rick Mayfield for the BRAC 1995 project. I'll be conducting the interview. My name is Alyssa Kameraman, and on the camera with me is Sarah Langston. So, thank you again for visiting with us today. We really appreciate it. I just wanted to start by asking, you mentioned off camera that in 1983 you started working for the planning and development department. RM: Davis County Planning and Economic Development Office, yeah. AK: Were you still working there when BRAC 1995 started? RM: No, I left Davis County in the first part of 1994 to go to work for Governor Leavitt, and I was the director of Business and Economic Development for Governor Leavitt for eight years for his first two terms. It would be of interest to you I'm sure that before I was officially announced, we had just gone through BRAC ‘93. The governor came in on the heels of BRAC ‘93, not knowing much about the military in the state of Utah. We lost the Tooele Army Depot in 1993 through BRAC, so 1 the governor had me put together a team that he called the Utah Defense Conversion Team, and the legislature provided some funds to try to figure out what to do. So, I was calling people to be on a committee that the governor was appointed and nobody knew who I was. I was saying, “The governor’s asked me to call you to be on this committee." That's where I started in the BRAC process, was on the heels of BRAC ‘93, and that put a panic into everybody that was associated with the military installation in Utah. The folks, Vickie McCall and Scott Trundle that was at The Standard, they put together Hill/DDO‘95. We kind of overlapped a little bit from the state's Defense Conversion Team for a while, but they were focused on Hill and the Defense Depot, Utah; I was focused on all of Utah. Eventually we came together and worked out and made it the Utah Defense Alliance instead of Hill/DDO‘95. So, I'm rambling a whole lot. AK: No, that's really good information. So, the Defense Conversion Team, you mentioned that you worked alongside Hill/DDO‘95, but you were still separate from it? RM: I was invited to be on the board as a representative of the state. The primary reason that I was invited wasn't because I was so brilliant or anything, it was because I was attached to legislative money, and they wanted some money. SL: Who did you ask to be on the Defense Conversion Team? RM: See, there you're testing my memory. SL: Well, was it like legislators or other officials? 2 RM: There was a senator from Tooele, Senator Mantes, a good Democrat. That was one of ‘em, Commissioner Gayle Stevenson from Davis County Commission. I don't remember others right now, but they were two of the main players because of the two installations, the Tooele and Dugway area. They met on a regular basis. They had funds that they appropriated for different things, like Tooele Army Depot. The Tooele County Commission needed money for reuse studies. That committee appropriated money that the legislature had given for helping us with defense conversion. AK: It sounds like you were a little more focused on all of the military installations in Utah as opposed to just Hill and DDO. RM: I was, yes. That was when I was with the state, yeah. AK: I'm curious about the efforts for military installations in Utah as a whole. Was there as much attention on Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah Test and Training Range, all those different places, as there was on Hill Air Force Base, or was the attention still mainly at Hill Air Force Base? RM: You know, the background of course is that Hill’s the anchor of military in the state of Utah. At the time, we were talking somewhere between 18,000 and 22,000 employees at HAFB. Where, went out to Tooele Army Depot, and I think there was less than 2,000 employees there. One of the unique things about the closure of the Tooele Army Depot was that Representative Jim Hansen had just got an appropriation to build a $125,000,000 modern truck repair facility—state of the art. Just as that was completed is when they closed the Army Depot, and Penske Oil wound up with that building for a while. But it was just an 3 unbelievable thing that the government spent $125,000,000 dollars on a new facility and then closed it within months. But they gave Tooele an opportunity to do some reuse studies, and over time it turned out fairly well. AK: Why do you think that they closed it right after spending so much money on it? RM: I don't know. It's politics, and those things don't make a lot of sense anyway. AK: Yeah, that makes sense. What were some of the business and economic aspects of the Tooele closure that you saw? Were there were some challenges that arose that you had to address? RM: Well, at the time, the economy of the state of Utah was dragging a little bit, and Tooele especially. They've had a lot of growth since then, but they were really worried about losing people out of the community even. So, they had a reuse committee that I was just a part of. They had local people that directed that: an economic development director that kind of oversaw it, and the county attorney was heavily involved. A lot of it was trying to get the military to donate the base, the land, the equipment to the community, and a lot of it was. They were out shopping for people, like Penske made a special deal because of some of the things he provided to the military on a rush basis. They made him a slick deal, and I don't know what the deal really was, but yeah, it was a gift. AK: Did the reuse efforts in Tooele kind of help you retain those people that you were afraid you would lose out there? RM: Yeah, you know, it played a part, but there's always a lag from a base closure till the reuse. There's probably about a five-to-10-year process of trying to make things somewhere near what they were, in fact some take 20 years. It depends 4 on where you're at. Yes, it's an effort for the military and the government to try to help communities that have base closures. There was an organization, a national organization, I can't remember the name of it. I think it was made that communities that had base closures or threatened base closures belong to that group. They had annual meetings or semiannual meetings to help people understand the reuse process. So, we used to go to those all the time. AK: What would the economic impact have been if Hill Air Force Base had been closed in 1995? RM: You know, it's interesting. I grew up in Clearfield. I lived probably a half a mile from the west fence of Hill Air Force Base. So, it's been part of my life forever, it seems like. But at 1995, the economy of Utah, Hill Air Force was the largest employer in the state of a lot of jobs there that were decent-paying jobs. So, it was really the economy of Davis and Weber County, especially North Davis County and Weber County. Just it seemed like everything was tied to military spending, so it would have been devastated. We had a study done and I don't have it or can't remember it, but it showed what would happen if the base would have been closed, and it would have really affected everything in the state because of the impact of Davis and Weber County on the state economy. But the housing market would have crashed. Again, we're looking at the lag time for reuse if we would have done reuse. We were looking at what happens if it closes, what do we do? We had ideas, but nothing put together that, “If it closes, this is what we'll do.” But we 5 knew there would be a lag time of at least 10 years to process the facility into a reuse situation. AK: Was there a concern about DDO closing as far as economically? RM: There was some concern that the impact of closing DDO wasn't all that great. It was a lot of warehousing facilities, and the reuse of that happened quicker than a lot of areas. But I'll go back further: You know, Freeport Center in Clearfield was a Naval depot when I grew up in Clearfield. My dad worked there. It was just unbelievable to have a Naval depot in the desert, but they did. It was a supply depot and they closed that in, I think, the mid 1960s. I can't remember the date for sure. It took a long time to convert it to the Freeport Center. It sat vacant for a long time until the group got together and made a deal with the government and turned it into Freeport Center. AK: So, what were some of the things that you did with Hill/DDO’95 to kind of help make the community and local leaders aware of the importance of the military bases in Utah? RM: Well, I think the credits for Hill/DDO’95 was the few people on that committee that brought awareness to the community of what was going on. That group had a great relationship. Jim Hansen was our champion in Congress, but we had Senator Bennett and Senator Hatch that were highly engaged. So, it was just trying to get the information out to people that we had threatened closure. Then it was trying to put together strategic plans of how to tackle the criteria that the Air Force used on figuring out who to close and who not to close. Highly political process. Our people at Hill/DDO were highly engaged in it. Governor Leavitt was 6 highly engaged, and later on, Governor Walker and then Governor Huntsman, they all got on board trying to save the facility because it's just such a great employer in Utah. AK: Were you there for the secret meeting in Dave Tanzi’s basement, where General Yates came and met with Hill/DDO’95 at the very beginning of BRAC’95 and kind of told them the situation about Hill Air Force Base not having very much political clout, that kind of stuff? RM: Yes. AK: What do you remember of that event? RM: There were so many meetings we had and bringing in people that were friends of ours that they couldn't speak publicly. I can't remember a lot about that meeting, but I can remember having the meeting and being invited. AK: Tell me a little bit about some of the preparations you guys did for the commissioner visits. There was a community visit in December 1994, and then there was a visit to Hill Air Force Base in May of 1995. Do you remember either of those? RM: You know, I don't remember those specifically. Later on, as we got into BRAC 2005, we were more experienced in what we were doing. During that process, we brought in a consultant from Washington to help us, a guy by the name of Jamie Gallagher. He was an independent that a lot of these guys were lobbyists that knew the military. So, he was our contact in Washington. Then we worked with a group that represented, I can't remember whether the group represented 7 Georgia or Texas. I think they were Georgia's representative lobbyist in Washington, and so we kind of piggybacked on what they were doing. It was a matter of everybody sharing information, and the Air Force depots—we had us and Georgia and San Antonio, but also Dayton, Ohio was involved. We used to have quarterly meetings with those people because we were all fighting for the same type of thing, even though in a sense we were competitors. But we were trying to keep the Depot coalition together, saying, “You need all three.” There was a lot of talk over time that they could get rid of one of us, and Hill always seems to turn out to be the weakest. So, a lot of what happened was backroom stuff, and in the military operations, the “who knows who” friends type of thing. The Hill/DDO people, we all of us together, spent a lot of time going to Washington, going to military functions in Washington, and did other trips. We'd go to Oklahoma, we'd go to Georgia, go to Texas to meet with our type of groups to talk about how to fight BRAC. Then it was trying to figure out who to contact, how to contact him. We learned a lot, so in 2005 we were much better prepared than ‘95. In ‘95 I think we just kind of lucked out more than anything. It's hard to say, you know. There are so many variables that were involved. AK: That’s interesting. So, in 2005, all three ALCs kind of fought for each other in a way? RM: Right. AK: That's cool, I didn't realize that. 8 RM: Well, we kind of talked about, “We're competitors, but because we're Logistics Centers, we ought to work together to try to save us all.” So, we worked with some fantastic people in those communities. It worked out for everybody. AK: You mentioned that Hill Air Force Base for some reason came out as the weakest Air Logistics Center any time they did a study like that. Why was that? Was that just politically? RM: I think a lot of it was politics. Tinker, in Oklahoma City, they kind of vacillated a little with us, too. Depends on who you talk to, who was the weakest. But when you got to Washington, the rumors were that Utah's probably most vulnerable. But again, how do you really know? It was a lot of hearsay. AK: Interesting. Backing up a little bit, I wanted to know, did you have any involvement in the creation of the Business Depot Ogden after the closure of DDO? RM: You know, I just went to some meetings, but I didn't have a lot to do with that. I was invited to their meetings. Again, some of it was because I was the governor's person and I was attached to money and everybody looks for money. You get pretty popular if you have money. AK: So, since you were a part of the Business and Economic Development department, basically, or the governor's team—I don't know what the right word is for it, sorry if I'm incorrect. Since you were part of that, did you have people on your team that were in charge of helping businesses transfer over to BDO? RM: We did. We had programs. We had a program called The National, their whole job was to try to bring new companies to Utah. We had another program that was 9 to help businesses grow in Utah. So yeah, I had staff people that were working with Tooele and DDO. AK: Okay. I'm curious about your involvement with Utah Defense Alliance post-1995. When did Hill/DDO’95 turn into the Utah Defense Alliance? RM: I can't remember for sure. Some of it was because of the state money that we were putting into Hill/DDO’95, and we were trying to strengthen everybody in Utah and the others, like Tooele, didn't have an organization. We had the governor's defense conversion team, but it wasn't specialized in any particular area. So, I think it was my idea, I'm not sure, but to call it the Utah Defense Alliance and broaden our base and invite the other installations to be a part of us. There was transition, I think, maybe like 2004 or something like that, where we invited, like commissioners from Tooele, other people to be part of our organization. We restructured membership and invited other people to be there. AK: Was that in part because you knew that a 2005 BRAC was coming? RM: Yes. Once '95 was over, we kept working, looking at when the next BRAC might be, and it kept being pushed back. We thought it would be sooner when we first started, but it was trying to prepare for that, trying to organize. AK: This might be kind of an odd question, but do you know if September 11, 2001, affected BRAC at all? I'm curious because with 9/11, there was a new influx of military activity. RM: I don't recall anything being connected there. AK: Okay. Yeah, like I said, weird question, but it popped in my head. 10 RM: Yeah. Now, I left the state in 2001 and went into the consulting business, and I was doing some stuff. Actually, I don't know whether you remember the Olympics and the buffalo project where we painted buffalo. That was my project that Davis County adopted. I'd been working on it at the state, and Davis County Council of governments, which is, all of the mayors and county commissioners have a nonprofit organization, and I put that together. They had some money that we’d got, federal money, that they hired me on a part-time basis to do some economic development things. In that position, when we got going after '95, 2001 and Hill/DDO was transferring into a state thing, because I knew there was money at the state. We just kind of joined together and looking for money to hire help. So, Davis County Council governments, I was doing half time for them. They loaned me to the Utah Defense Alliance, so I was actually paid by Davis County Council of Governments on a consulting basis, but I was on loan to be staff for the Utah Defense Alliance. It was kind of a convenient loaning thing, but we just needed some staff to keep things running. Later on, Vickie McCall and I were kind of co-directors of the Utah Defense Alliance. Both of us were paid a few days a week to keep the organization running. So, we spent a lot of time working together on things for Hill/DDO and actually the Utah Defense Alliance eventually. AK: So, I want to know a little bit about your involvement with the creation of MIDA, because I think Jim Sutton was saying that you were pretty instrumental in creating MIDA. Is that correct? 11 RM: Yeah, but he was just as instrumental as I was, maybe even more so. We used to look at it as a three-legged stool that we had the Air Force, we had Woodbury Corporation that was the developer, and then the MIDA thing that came in. But we started—it was my role in Davis County Council of Governments and UDA that gave me the opportunity to be invited in to talk about Enhanced Use Lease. We probably went through a year of talking about it before much was done. Originally, Senator Hatch had brought in some people to try to take advantage of the Enhanced Use Lease law. The Air Force was reluctant to recognize local input, and I can remember, I don't remember the timing, but I can remember Stuart Adams, Senator Adams, and I think Kevin Sullivan was the base commander at the time. We thought that the whole thing was just going to pot. Stuart Adams called a bunch of local leaders to a meeting with, I think Jim Sutton was involved, and we had a couple of guys from Washington that were experts in enhanced use leasing come out, and General Sullivan accommodated us. That really was what kind of mushroomed out into what eventually came to be MIDA. We had this one guy that was assigned to us from Washington that we'd say, "Well, this is what we want to do.” He'd say, "No, you can't do that." So, Jim Sutton and Woodburys, they had been working on it for months. I can't remember the exact timing, but they needed community involvement somehow. Davis County Council of Governments was a nonprofit organization that could have stepped in as a community participant to make the third leg of 12 that three-legged stool, but it just wasn't quite the right fit. So, I'm working with this guy from Washington who's trying to discourage us because nobody had ever done it before. I'm at a meeting in San Diego of this group of reuse of bases, and this guy from Washington was there, the state legislature was in session, and Senator Killpack, who was from Syracuse, was highly interested in making it all work. I would talk to this guy from Washington and he'd tell me, "You don't want to do it, you can't do it." Well, we said, “If we had a nonprofit organization, they could step in to be the developer.” Not like a Woodbury that came in with the actual expertise to be the developer, but we could be the overall. So, I'm talking that way, and this guy is discouraging us. I'm on the phone to Senator Killpack, who's writing legislation to create some kind of an organization that turned out to be MIDA. We put together some pretty loose wording of MIDA and got it passed by the legislature. That was the third leg of the stool. We had a state authority then that could do everything else that the developer and the Air Force couldn't do. It was just a great group coming together to make it work. At the time, after the legislation was passed, I was working with the governor's office to try to appoint people to the board, and we tried to make it more of a state thing instead of a Davis/Weber County thing. So, we had some people from Tooele that were on the board, but Jerry Stevenson and Stuart Adams were named to the board and elected as chairman and vice chairman. If my memory's right, they were not part of the Senate at the time. They came in 13 after that. Senator Killpack, he got into some political trouble and he resigned. I think Jerry took his place in the legislature and Stuart came in, and those two guys were kind of the masterminds of making sure we got done what we recommended that we needed to do. Then there was, I think, a five-member board. We had Gary Harter, who was out of the governor's office on the board. Gary was former commander at Dugway. So, there was just some people that came together. We had Mayor Wood out of Clearfield, Mayor Richie out of Roy, that came together to make up the MIDA board. We started, every legislative session we changed the legislation a little bit more and a little bit more. I was named the director of MIDA, and within six months I hired a guy, Paul Morris, who's running MIDA right now. Paul was a land use expert, an attorney, knew bonding. He came in, and so he helped us step through changing some of the legislation to do things that a city could do. So, the MIDA legislation, really, if you looked at a city's abilities and MIDA’s abilities they are pretty much the same. The one thing that was a sore point for some of our cities was MIDA had the ability to tax the area that we were working in, but it was government property. So, the cities weren't getting any taxes. But we were showing that we were doing private development so the buildings on the Air Force property would be taxed, and the cities wanted that tax money. We said, "No, MIDA’s gotta have that tax money to operate with." So, we had two mayors on the board and finally they were convinced to do it. That's how we moved ahead, just having the local political group to do it. It was a lot of cooperation, but a lot of feeling our way. 14 As it turned out, the state of Utah was the only state in the union that ever developed any kind of an enhanced use lease plan that were so encompassing. We had some that wanted to, but the politics of Utah being strongly Republican, highly free enterprise, they made it work. Where I talked to a number of other states, they wanted to know how we did it. We gave presentations in national conferences. Nobody had the political strength or unity to make it happen. We were the model for not just the Air Force, but the military, on how to do enhanced use leasing. Now, there is a number of other states that did housing under enhanced use leasing, but nobody had a project like ours. Now I understand it's just grown so big. I left MIDA, what, 2014, and since then, I think there's been $200,000,000 spent in that Falcon Hill area. That was the last number I heard. But some big buildings, Northrop Grumman’s come in with some great—and again some of it's been legislative appropriations that made it work, primarily because Jerry and Stuart were in the legislature and finally in leadership and made it happen. We brought in engineering jobs into the state of Utah completely outside of the military. Well, not completely, but I mean, we enhanced the technology growth of northern Utah just with MIDA. It's been a wonderful thing. When we first started, Jeff Woodbury used to get up in our meetings and said, “With our blueprint, Falcon Hill will be larger in square feet, or at least equal to downtown Salt Lake,” and it's headed in that direction. It's just been a great tool for the economy in the state of Utah. 15 AK: That's amazing. [To Sarah] What was the other question about MIDA that Jim Sutton asked us to ask about? I feel like there was one more. SL: I don’t remember. AK: I know, me neither. Yeah, I'm sorry, but that is really interesting. I remember him saying that enhanced use leasing was something that he kind of adopted from, like, private business sector a little bit. What made you guys—? RM: The interesting thing, and I think Jim was one of those, Jim was the base planner for years, and he was an aggressive guy. I think he's retired Air Force. But he talked enhanced use leasing for at least a year, maybe two years, before we ever got the vision. It was a law that had been on the books for years, but nobody had used it. The basic principle was that every military base had underutilized property, so the law allowed a base commander to say, “Here's 15 acres or 20 acres or 100 acres that is underutilized,” so they could put that out to bid to lease it to private developers, but the lease had to reflect some kind of benefit to the military. With Hill, it was a big chunk. It was 500 acres on the west side of the base that all of those old warehouses that were dilapidated and needed to be replaced or remodeled and there was no money to do it. So, Jim and Woodburys really came up with this idea of that's a way to redevelop Hill Air Force Base, or at least that older section on the west side. There was some vacant land in there. When I was brought into it, kind of because of my old connection with the state and what I was doing with Davis County and my background in Davis County, I could see what needed to be 16 done. Jim and I worked hand in hand to make it happen. Jeff Woodbury, they were the money people, the developer people. So, it was a great team. You know, in a sense that you look back and think it's almost a miracle that it happened, because it was being innovative with a law that had been on the books for a lot of years. It was a way to strengthen the base and avoid closure. So, it all fit together in what we'd been trying to do for a number of years. Nobody knew that it would ever turn out as well as it has. AK: That's interesting. How does the military gain revenue from it? I know that there's—it's not all going to the military, right? RM: Yeah, and usually it's a tradeoff. If you interview the Woodbury people, they could tell you better, but it's a tradeoff type of thing. The military says, “Okay, here is a plot of land that you can build this building on, and it's a lease for 50 years.” So, the amount of money that you're going to gain from that in 50 years has to be returned to the base. What they would do is say, “Okay, we need this.” Woodburys would build them a building or do the repairs or tear down a building. So, it was an equal for equal type of a deal. It wasn't a cash transaction. It was usually something for something tradeoffs. That's a real rough description because I was never involved in those type of negotiations. It was always between usually the Air Force in Washington and the Woodburys. AK: Okay, and the military holds the lease then, so they get the revenue from that? 17 RM: The Air Force holds the lease, so the accumulated revenue would then be used to do what the Air Force needed done. All of those old buildings, eventually most of them will be destroyed and new buildings built for the Air Force. AK: You're talking about—is that the ones that are kind of by, there’s like a railroad track. I guess that is kind of like the northwestern side of it, is that right? RM: Right. AK: Okay, interesting. Are they completely abandoned, those buildings? RM: I don't know. There were a few, but most of them still had some kind of occupancy, yeah. AK: That is really interesting. Is there any other questions that you have? SL: Well, I want to go back to ‘95 round. RM: See, I sidetracked you because I can't remember back that far. SL: I'm just interested in your opinion of Jim Hanson and what he did for Hill during, I mean really not just '95, but during his entire career in Congress? RM: Jim was probably the champion of champions when it came to helping a state with military opportunity. He was a bulldog in Congress, and he was on the committees, the Defense Appropriations Committees, as were a couple of people, like from Oklahoma and Georgia. Those are the people that really helped save the bases. Jim was always accommodating to us as we were fighting the BRAC process. He was always lining us up with people. He was the front runner to try to get information for us. Jim's a different personality, but he's just a heck of a worker for the state of Utah. If it weren't for Jim, we'd be in a different situation. 18 Now, Senator Hatch was also a pretty good worker for us, but he was in a bigger frying pan than Jim was. Jim was the leader. SL: Did you notice, when you worked for Leavitt being in the state, that most people outside of northern Utah didn't understand the impact of Hill Air Force Base? RM: Oh, I think that's a foregone conclusion. People in northern Utah didn't understand the impact of Hill Air Force Base unless they worked there. You know, if they had a job, they knew that it was their bread and butter. Governor Leavitt, brilliant guy, but he didn't understand military in the state of Utah. Not many would unless they were right there. But he caught on real fast and he was a champion for us. I mean, he got legislative money. He was very supportive of everything I did with Hill/DDO and eventually Utah Defense Alliance. He was part of the champion team. He and Jim Hansen were talking all the time, and Senator Hatch. AK: I'm wondering, what is the impact of Hill Air Force base and military installations in general on Utah's economy today? Is it as important as ‘95? RM: You know, I've been away from it so long that I know that our economy in the state of Utah is so diverse now and so robust that I wouldn't say that you could close Hill and we wouldn't notice it, but there wouldn't be the impact that there would have been in ‘95. I mean, it would have devastated Davis County, especially north Davis County and most of Weber County, even up to Box Elder County. It just would have had a devastating effect. Today, I'm not sure how true that is because of our robust economy and the diversity that we have now in our economy. We were highly military. 19 Again, going back to my history with Davis County, you know, 1960, if I remember right, we were just around a million people, but Davis County was sixty thousand people. So, if you think about that, it was mostly an agriculture county. The base economy of Davis and Weber County was agriculture. End of World War II, or during the last part of World War II, we're building the Navy base, DDO, Hill Air Force Base in the ‘40s. That provided jobs for farms in Davis County that were being divided now from grandma and grandpa to mom and dad. Now the kids are coming along and they're taking these small 200-acre farms and dividing them up and you can't make a living off of it. So, what you have is the military coming in to northern Utah providing jobs for these people that really wanted to be farmers. That was the transition of the economy in Utah from agriculture to a military base type of economy. The jobs were there, you know, those jobs provided an opportunity for restaurants and everything else that we do, grocery stores. But today, you have that transition from where we were with military jobs now to any kind of job you want to talk about, we've got it in the state of Utah, and one of the finest economies in the United States. I'd like to say that was because I was the director of economic development in the state for eight years, but it's not true. But it's like if you talk about the Hill/DDO ‘95 group and you say, “What did they do?” They got the citizens of the area just charged up to try to save the base. We probably did a better job than any other state because our people were engaged. That was our economy and we couldn't take it away. I 20 would say Hill/DDO '95 was the cause of that, then it transitioned to UDA and it never stopped. They were charged up to do things. AK: Do you feel like the BRAC process helped awaken Utahns to the importance of military installation? RM: Oh, yeah, definitely it did. Yeah, we were sleepers. If you look at Tooele, nobody dreamed that they would ever close an Army Depot, even though it was small, after you build a 125-million-dollar repair facility there, state of the art. Nobody would have ever guessed it. But that's how our government operates. That's how the military operates. Right today, there's more military inventory in land and buildings than they really need. But it's a political thing and presidents are reluctant to get involved in that political process. They ignore it today. Since 2005, there's been talk about BRAC every administration, and it's just kind of been shoved aside and there's not a big threat anymore. AK: Since our economy is more diversified now, do you feel like we've gone back to maybe pre-1993 where the community isn't as involved in supporting the base, or do you feel like BRAC has helped continue to help people—? RM: I guess that I don't feel like I have a pulse of the community to measure that. I think what I have seen, just a little connection I have with what MIDA’s been doing, I see that there's some other things besides the old airplanes flying and the repair facilities. There's technology pods on the base now that have made a real difference in the attitude about Hill Air Force Base, I think. It's more of a professional base than a blue-collar base, even though there's a mix of both now. 21 If it weren't for F-35s flying over, most people wouldn't even know we had a base there. By the way, the UDA was, I think, instrumental in getting the F-35 here and replace the F-22s, which was part of the whole process of trying to fight BRAC. We tried to position ourselves so that we had more than what we had before. I don't know whether anybody's talked about this, but under the Leavitt administration and with Stuart Adams' help, we tried to get 15 million dollars, because we had identified military workload that could be done at Hill Air Force Base that had been assigned someplace else, but they didn't have either equipment or space to do it. So, one of our consultants identified that kind of workload at different places. The legislature gave us 5 million dollars one year that we went out and bought equipment for specialized workload and donated it to the Air Force, which was quite a feat because the Air Force didn't even know how to accept it. We had to go through a whole process with the secretary of the Air Force just for them to be able to accept us donating 5 million dollars’ worth of equipment so they could transfer the work load into Hill. So, those are some of the things that we did in trying to save the base, to BRAC-proof us, if you would. We were coming up with those kind of strategies. The Leavitt administration was very supportive of that. Jim Hansen was part of helping us to understand that process. AK: Just out of curiosity, what was the importance of the F-35? Why did you feel it was important to bring it to Hill Air Force Base? 22 RM: Well, the F-35 was the state-of-the-art coming aircraft. The F-22 was so old in age that we knew it was eventually going to go. So, we just put our eye on, say, why not bring the F-35 here? It took a lot of political maneuvering to get them to name us as the F-35. We were the original F-35 base. The other part about it was the environmental impact that we had to go through. The noise, as you probably realize, is greater than the F-22. I don't know where you live, but if you live anywhere in that band that goes out to the Utah test and training range, I mean you can't shop at Wal-Mart without knowing that there’s an F-35 flying over it. But it was one of our efforts to save the base. AK: Is there anything else? Okay, my last question is maybe a little redundant, but how can the community continue to support UDA and their efforts with Hill Air Force base and other military installations? RM: I don't know. I've been away from it long enough that I hate to say, yeah, if they did this and this. But I think that overall, the communities around the base and the state of Utah have been very supportive of the base. There's a whole lot more going on from Salt Lake in supporting change of commanders, operations. You get a lot more support out of the capitol than you used to. I think that all plays into the importance of the base. But also, I think as a result of our hard work on BRAC and fighting BRAC, people became aware. But I think we're more appreciative in Utah of our military operations than you find in a lot of other states. People in Utah are patriots, they appreciate the military. My soapbox. AK: That's great. Thank you so much. RM: You're welcome. 23 WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Stewart Library ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AGREEMENT 1: This Interview Agreement is made and entered into this day(s) of A-pri / 2,0Z,I by and between the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program (WSUSLOHP) t-M:. f'uty {:,'-e{d, and , hereinafter called "Interviewee." 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