CLEVELAND — For Bartlett Maritime Founder and CEO Ed Bartlett, the pace of business is picking up this week.
“Every single day, we get people calling us and emailing us asking us when can we start applying for jobs,” he said.
This is after the release of the revised Bartlett Maritime Plan this week, which involves a project to improve the maintenance of nuclear-powered attack submarines.
The plan calls for, among other things, the construction of two repair facilities in Lordstown and Lorain. The problems related to the backlog of repairs to the Navy’s submarine force are well documented.
“Thirty-seven percent of the Navy's attack submarines are out of service because of a shortage of maintenance capability,” Bartlett said. “Reports from the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate, the reports from the Navy itself and the General Accountability Office all indicate that additional maintenance capacity and capability on an industrial basis are required.”
The Lorain plant would handle the repair, rebuilding and refurbishing of all the components of a sub being overhauled. They’d then be shipped to what’s called a kitting center in Lordstown, that’s where different but related items are packaged and shipped together. In this case, to a shipyard ahead of a sub’s overhaul.
“When a submarine pulls in for an overhaul before it even gets there, Lordstown will have developed a kit full of equipment and material, shipped it off by both rail and truck to the shipyard wherever it is,” Bartlett said
Thus cutting, they estimate 100 days off of repair time.
Now Bartlett had hoped to build a shipyard in Lorain where subs could physically be repaired, but he says the Navy nixed that idea.
“Due to the challenges of transiting through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the problem with ballasting ships for submergence in fresh water in the Great Lakes, the Navy elected to not do a shipyard in the Great Lakes, and we went back and have redone our plan,” Bartlett said
Still, Bartlett said the Lorain location will be looking at 500 to 1,000 new jobs to start with Lordstown in a range from three to 500. They’ve proposed the site for the new shipyard to be in Charleston, South Carolina, but it too will be staffed in part by Northeast Ohio workers.
“When we eventually get to the shipyard in South Carolina, we're actually going to develop and implement a rotational workforce approach where we'll train people at our Ohio facility and rotate them, kind of like an off-shore oil rig kind of job where you go to where the work is for a couple or three weeks, whatever it might be and then get an extended period of time off back where you live and we'll transport you back and forth and give you housing,” he said. “So while we can't bring the ships to the people, eventually, when we get to the shipyard, we're going to bring the people to the ships.”
“This is going to be a great employment opportunity for the people of Ohio and around the greater Great Lakes region,” Bartlett said.
Bartlett is confident this ball will soon get rolling.
“We think that within the next four to six weeks, we're going to be under contract, and that's because that will be the end of the fiscal year, and we think the money required for the first phase of our project is available in the current fiscal year that ends September 30. So we're hopeful that we will be under contract before September 30,” Bartlett said.
Once they’re under contract, he said they’ll begin the process of hiring and training workers.
“We're going to include 16 weeks of paid training for a group of 30 people during the first six months. That training is in plan to start at Week 10 of our contract and be completed at Week 26 when we should complete the entire planning process," Bartlett said. "And then after Week 26, we have to wait three weeks because of a Federal law on how long the Navy has to wait before they actually do the contract that allows us to go to capital markets but in the seventh month, we expect then to be able to go to capital markets and break ground.”
Going to the capital markets because the Bartlett Plan helps the Navy get around the current concern about deficit spending in Washington.
“We will arrange the financing, we'll use the capital markets to do it, and then the Navy has the opportunity from us to do a so-called lease-purchase over a 30-year period when they would eventually then own the facilities," Bartlett said. "So it works out well for the Navy within the budget, works out well for the Federal government, and it gets our submarines the maintenance they require.”
Watch live and local news any time:
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
