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Military

Small Defense Contractors Vie For Shrinking Budget Pie

By Alison St John / Reporter
Published August 24, 2011 at 4:28 AM PDT
This story was published more than 13 years ago.
The Navy's Gold Coast Conference 2011 in San Diego
Alison St John
The Navy's Gold Coast Conference 2011 in San Diego
Small Defense Contractors Vie For Shrinking Budget Pie
Small defense contractors at a Navy conference in San Diego hope their agility will grow their share of a shrinking DOD budget pie.

More than 1,000 defense industry contractors from around the country are attending the Navy’s Gold Coast Conference in San Diego this week.

Jim Lasswell is small business chair of San Diego’s Defense Industry Association, which co-sponsored the conference, and president of Indus Technologies, a business he said has grown 15 percent a year recently. Lasswell said the buzz this year is about cloud computing and ways to protect top security information.

“A year ago, if you mentioned the word ‘cloud,’ they were thinking you were talking about weather, and now we’re talking about this amazing network of places to store data," said Lasswell. "This is a great time for people who are able to innovate and do things quickly - this favors the small business solution.”

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Lasswell said even as the defense budget shrinks, small businesses have an advantage because they can adapt fast to changing needs. He estimates about 75 small businesses in San Diego have prime contracts directly with the DOD , and many more have subcontracts with big defense contractors, like General Atomics and Northrup Grumman.

The Department of Defense spent more than $10 billion on defense contracts in San Diego in 2009, the latest information available.

Representatives from the Navy’s Facilities Engineering Command, or NAVFAC, said they anticipate cuts of 10 percent or more next year, which will affect the number of construction contracts available. The Navy and Marine Corps in San Diego have seen an unprecedented building boom in the past three years, which has poured billions into the local economy.

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Alison St John
Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.
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