For Immediate Release

October 6, 1999

FINAL AGREEMENT REACHED ON DEFENSE BILL - KITSAP IMPACT

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A House-Senate Conference Committee approved the final version of the Defense Appropriations bill for the current fiscal year, including a substantial boost for the Navy's depot maintenance budget, U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks said Wednesday.

          The defense spending bill will include a total of $2.432 billion for ship depot maintenance activities, up from $2.074 billion that was ultimately spent in the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, he said.

          The congressman also said that the conference panel agreed to add $2 million for the design of a Regional Telecommunications Center in Bremerton as a new initiative. The new center will integrate emergency communications among all three Navy facilities in Kitsap County and among local police, fire and emergency services into one emergency network. The Navy funds will be matched by local government contributions in creating the network, which will eventually result in significant cost savings for the Navy and for local fire and law enforcement agencies, Rep. Dicks said.

          In this initial year, the funding will pay for the design of a single, integrated communication link, as well as for the development of two fixed location radio sites and the development of a new digital communications network, the congressman said. The Motorola Corporation has been working with the Navy and local emergency officials, who have combined earlier plans to improve their own systems into this new joint network, he said.

         Dicks said the bill will also include the amount recommended by his House subcommittee in July, $338 million, for the procurement of 12 D-5 missiles in the next fiscal year, and it continues to fund the planning for the Trident backfit program, replacing the missiles aboard the Bangor-based submarines and overhauling the submarines at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The backfit program represents one-third of the workload at the shipyard between 2000 and 2007.

          Other Kitsap area expenditures approved in the final version of the defense budget today were:

• $3 million for a new carrier based anti-submarine warfare program to be developed at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center at Keyport, Wash.
• $4 million to continue an environmentally-sound asbestos recycling program at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS)
• $3 million in the Navy budget for a software program developed by Applied Technical Systems of Bremerton, designed for intuitive searching and analysis of intelligence databases. The program is currently being incorporated into Army database architecture, and the new funding would allow for future interoperability between the two services.
• $8 million to continue a resource preservation initiative to be conducted by Concurrent Technologies Corporation at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. The study program will identify methods to reduce and eliminate environmentally-hazardous waste streams from shipyard operations.
• $4 million to PSNS for the testing and evaluation of a new metal parts fabrication system which uses computer aided design information to produce metal components for Navy ships.
• Rep. Dicks also added $30 million to the defense budget this year for Impact Aid to Education, which is provided to districts heavily impacted by federal installations to compensate for the loss of local tax base.

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