Early reviews of the Ohio National Guard’s attack on urban
blight in Youngstown are in, and most of them are nothing short of blockbuster.
House by house and block by block, about 40 members of the 1192nd Engineer Co.
of Ravenna have come to the aid of the city with crushing force. In
well-coordinated maneuvers that began July 10 and that will end Saturday, some
of our state’s finest citizen soldiers are expected to demolish 28 homes in the
vicinity of Hudson and Sheridan avenues on the South Side. Their work is making
a tangible contribution to the yeoman’s job of clearing thousands of abandoned,
decaying, unsafe and unhealthy structures in Youngstown. For that progress, we
issue a thanks and a plea to officials at the U.S. Department of Defense. First,
we thank them for approving this summer’s most productive two-week deployment.
Second, we urge them to authorize a much longer deployment in 2018 to clear ten
times as many blighted structures, as city leaders envision.
This summer’s
short-term experimental mission, however, proved long enough to shed light on
the arsenal of strategic gains the mission is accomplishing. First, in sheer
dollars and sense, the guardsmen’s volunteer work is saving the cash-strapped
city an estimated $159,000 in demolition costs, according to Abigail Beniston,
housing code enforcement and blight remediation superintendent for Youngstown.
Those saved dollars can be allocated to razing other dilapidated buildings or
toward other critical municipal needs. Second, the inner-city deployment
provides a viable and productive training ground for members of the
Ravenna-based company of the Army National Guard. That unit specializes in the
skillful use of heavy machinery, and few machines are more hulking than the
imposing bulldozers, cranes and excavators used in razing decrepit homes. The
talents unit members hone in Youngstown then could be applied to a military
scenario, where skillful structure demolitions can prove life-saving on the
battlefield by denying shelter and supplies to enemy forces. The well-deserved
appreciation and compliments from neighbors also enhance the overall public
perception of the guard, in particular, and the American military, in general.
To read the full story from The Vindicator, click here.
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