Charles Crane/MDN Sen. John Hoeven, at right, addresses Task Force 21 members Brekka Kramer, left, Sen. Randy Burckhard and Mark Jantzer at the Minot Area EDC office in Minot on Monday during a planning meeting regarding local efforts to generate cost-savings measures to advance nuclear modernization programs at Minot Air Force Base.

U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, R-ND, met with members of Task Force 21 in Minot Monday to discuss the role the community can play in the ongoing efforts to support the continued modernization of the dual-nuclear missions at Minot Air Force Base.

Hoeven said he recently met with Kathy Warden, CEO of Northrop Grumman, Under Secretary of Defense William Laplante and other Department of Defense leadership regarding a shift in the deployment of the Sentinel missile program. He said his hopes that an accelerated schedule and cost savings could be found in a concurrent construction plan for bases at F.E. Warren AFB, Wyoming, Malmstrom AFB, Montana, and Minot AFB.

“If you think it about, it just makes a lot of sense because instead of going into one community and requiring all of those resources at once — which simple supply and demand drives up costs — if we spread it across the three communities, it’s a lot more manageable task in each one and you don’t drive up costs so much,” Hoeven said. “They’re looking for this kind of help, so let’s give it to them cause that’s what we do. This is the kind of thing where Minot shines.”

Hoeven said to bring this approach to fruition it would require the direct engagement of not only Task Force 21 and the Minot Area EDC but the Minot community. Hoeven said it would take substantive proposals for the leadership to get behind the concurrent plan, which Minot City Council President and Task Force 21 Chair Mark Jantzer said would be welcomed by the community.

“Minot is ready. We’re ready to go from being last to being sooner in the process, and we will make whatever arrangements and form whatever groups we need to to move that forward,” Jantzer said.

State Sen. Randy Burckhard said his fellow legislators are ready to do their part following the Nuclear Triad Symposium held in Minot on April 23. Burckhard credited Minot Area Chamber EDC President and CEO and task force board member Brekka Kramer for the success of the symposium.

Kramer said the organizations are focused on preparing Minot and other communities in the state near the 8,500 square miles of the missile field for the mega-project.

“It’s exciting to hear that we are possibly going to concurrent instead of consecutive. It’s hard to get people in the community excited about things that aren’t going to be happening in three, six or nine years,” Jessica Klein, Task Force 21 board member, said. “We are very excited about getting prepared for the people coming in for Sentinel because certainly we want them to stay in the community once the project is over.”

Attendees highlighted areas of focus, including retaining workforce from among former Air Force members who moved to North Dakota bases during their deployment and ensuring appropriate housing and education facilities for the workforce near the missile sites.

Task Force 21 board member Cassidy Hjelmstad said conversations are already in progress with communities near the other air bases’ missile sites, including the mayor of Kimball, Nebraska, regarding the challenges the small community has faced. She said Kimball is surrounded by the main missile field, but has struggled in supplying appropriate levels of supplies and emergency services in a town with only one grocery store and one gas station.

“How do we coordinate with local emergency services and make sure everyone is on board? How do we get our counties and everything else ready to go so they are prepared, and we have the resources ready if they need to be addressed?” Hjelmstad said.

Hoeven said Minot has some advantages in having the experience of weathering the Bakken oil boom but said the challenge for the plan would be reducing the construction costs due to inflation. He said it was essential to quantify the cost savings while at the same time maintaining the nation’s nuclear deterrence.

“I want us to actually sell a process where we are working with DOD, the contractor Northrop Grumman and the community, and specifically identifying how we feed this back into the process so they look at changing the approach,” Hoeven said. “This is going to be a long process, so let’s get on it.”

In regard to housing, Kramer said the concurrent plan would enable cost savings by opening the door to utilizing or redeveloping existing housing rather than the construction of a temporary workforce housing hub.

“We watched that early on because of what we experienced with the boom. That was one of the things that we talked about in our Sentinel team in preparation as something we wanted to lean into and determine. Is that what’s best suited to our community or is there something else we can look into? Is there an area in town right now that’s blighted that we might want to redevelop? Is there an area of town that we can invest in as a community to prepare as a kind of work force space?” Kramer said.