One of Northeast Ohio’s biggest military operations is getting bigger. A former commercial cargo hanger at Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport is to become a deployment terminal run by the Air Force Reserve Station there.
The 25,000 square-foot hanger has been owned by Western Reserve Port Authority since 2012. Last week, details were worked out to shift a quarter of a million dollars in state funding from a now canceled project in Trumbull and Mahoning counties and to use it to buy the hanger. The next step will be to convert it to a center for handling the movements of large military units and equipment.
State Rep. Sean O’Brien of Bezzetta says, “We will purchase the building. The Port Authority will still hang on to the land but the building will be turned over to the Air Force, with the understanding that they will turn it into the embarkation-debarkation point.
No new employment figures have been projected, but the Airlift Wing is already one of the largest employers in the Mahoning Valley
