Odds are you haven’t heard of Fairview Park, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. The city, though, is trying to change that, at least in Washington, after NASA Glenn decided earlier this year to close two office buildings that lie within the city’s boundaries. That closure, according to an article Wednesday in West Life Newspaper, affects the largest group of employees in the suburb and will result in the loss of $631,000 in income taxes, which the town’s mayor described as “devastating”. Fairview Park does have a champion on Capitol Hill in the form of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who said he has contacted Glenn officials about the closure, asking them to allow the city to redevelop the buildings for other tenants.
Kucinich is also fighting to prevent job cuts at the center, by both trying to restore aeronautics funding and making sure Glenn gets “its fair share” of exploration-related work. “The money is going into space exploration,” Kucinich said. “We’re trying to simultaneously protect aeronautics but also recognize… that the administration has taken a new direction into space exploration. We want that work. If they’re cutting jobs under aeronautics, then we’ve got to get the jobs from space exploration.”
