A union representing workers at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County says it’s concerned about the future of the facility.
Ryan McCarthy, a business representative for District 1888 of the IAM Union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said in an interview last month there has been discussion about merging the Blue Grass Army Depot with the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas.
He said the U.S. Department of Defense is looking for “redundancies” among the facilities, and there is concern about workforce reductions.
“It’s a constant threat over there,” McCarthy said. “They’re trying to reduce spending.”
If that happens, he said, “it’s going to devastate Madison County and surrounding counties.”
Union representatives said about 535 employees at the depot are represented by IAM.
Those employees are in a variety of roles, and McCarthy said they have good jobs, paying $60,000 to $70,000 a year.
DeLane Adams, assistant communications director for the union, said last month the union was in the early stages of reaching out to Kentucky’s congressional delegation about the situation.
In a June 5 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who chairs the committee, asked Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll about potential closure of the Blue Grass Army Depot and two other facilities.
“We’ve read … about potential closure of Pine Bluff Arsenal, Blue Grass Army Depot, Red River Army Depot,” Wicker said. “… I would caution that we be very careful about that. Are you planning to propose closing these three facilities?”
Driscoll responded: “We are creating a plan to look at what we can do with them with shifting work from them as one of the options. I think General (Randy) George and I stand hand in hand with you acknowledging that our organic industrial base is not sufficient for the threats today or in the future.
“I think spending is constrained as it should be. We owe that to the American taxpayer. We are working on plans that could use those facilities for other purposes. But if the funding does not come and it has to come from the rest of the budget, I think our current belief is that those dollars at our current budgeted level would be best suited somewhere else.”
William Ritter, public affairs officer for the Blue Grass Army Depot, said in a briefing with the Herald-Leader that there is no plan to downsize or close the Blue Grass Army Depot or to merge its operations with Pine Bluff.
“The Army had what was called the Army Transformation Initiative, and they’re just looking at ways to be more efficient, you know save money. How do we train better, things of that nature,” he said.
“We’re in the review stage, and it’s a multiple year plan” expected to span five to seven years, he said.
Eliminating “waste and obsolete programs” is one of the missions of the Army Transformation Initiative, as stated by Driscoll in a May 1 letter to Army leaders.
“We will also continue to cancel programs that deliver dated, late-to-need, overpriced, or difficult-to-maintain capabilities,” he wrote. “Yesterday’s weapons will not win tomorrow’s wars.”
When asked about the depot’s future, Justine Barati, director of public and congressional affairs for Joint Munitions Command, said in a statement, “The Army Transformation Initiative directed that Army Materiel Command develop options for the future state of the Army’s Organic Industrial Base. AMC and Joint Munitions Command are initiating planning and actively conducting analysis to comply with the Army directive while continuing to support the Army readiness and surge capability that our arsenals, depots and ammunition plants provide warfighters, allies and partners.
“No closures are being announced at this time. However, we are evaluating options to optimize workloads at depots and munitions sites to improve efficiency and readiness across the Total Army. The artisan workforce at the OIB remains vital to national security, and we are committed to ensuring we maintain the right workforce to accomplish the mission.”
What Blue Grass Army Depot does
While the destruction of chemical weapons stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot has grabbed headlines over the years, Ritter points out that was a small portion of the operations on the more than 14,000-acre property. The depot serves as a storage, inspection and shipping site for “bombs and bullets of all shapes, sizes and weight.”
The depot ships conventional munitions to other military sites, supplying not only all branches of the U.S. military but also providing ammunition for other countries, such as Ukraine and Israel.
About 92% of the military’s “non-standard ammunition,” such as the AK-47, which is not a standard weapon used by the U.S., is stored at and shipped from the Blue Grass Army Depot, he said.
Additionally, he said the depot also stores and ships for the East Coast all the chemical defense equipment, such as protective suits and masks, that soldiers would need if they encountered chemical weapons.
Ritter said the depot ships about 300 containers of supplies per day by truck or locomotive.
“We’re kind of like the Amazon of bombs and bullets,” he said.
The site also provides training to military units and operates a security guard training program that Ritter said is expected to expand.
“BGAD has a lot of unique capabilities that don’t exist anywhere else in America’s military in some cases, or in the Army specifically,” Ritter said.
While there are more than 1,200 buildings at the depot, Ritter said some of them are empty or “underutilized,” so the Army is reaching out to “civilian defense type contractors to do business on the depot” in hopes of expanding public-private partnerships.
While he said he couldn’t provide specifics about who the Army is talking to, he did confirm one defense contractor has already signed on to store items in one of the buildings there.
“There are going to be new jobs on the depot. However, we don’t know what the jobs might be, or how many, or with what … organizations,” he said.
Aside from the contractor employees who work on-site at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, Ritter said there are about 600 full-time and contract workers at the depot, most of whom are civilians.
There are fewer than six uniformed military stationed at the site full-time, Ritter said.
Ritter said the Army is still considering what to do with the site where the chemical weapons were destroyed.
While the buildings where chemical weapons were destroyed will have to be demolished, Ritter said there are other parts of the plant that can be repurposed that are set up with infrastructure: “all the phone lines, computer cables, water, sewer, all that kind of stuff that’s needed to run a facility.”
“One of the things feasibility studies identified the BGCAPP would be a good home for is called energetics,” Ritter said.
Energetics, he said, are like gunpowder, providing the blast and thrust to make bullets, rockets or other weaponry go.
“Another example we’re still waiting on is making metal components for the 155 millimeter artillery round that has been the greatest used munition that we have shipped out of here for Ukraine,” he said.
More layoffs at plant that destroyed chemical weapons
Meanwhile, another round of layoffs is expected among the five companies contracted to run the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, where the last weapon in the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed in 2023.
Its mission largely accomplished, the plant is now in the “closure phase,” and earlier this year, the contractors began filing notices of impending layoffs under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act.
Five contractors have worked together to destroy the chemical weapons stockpile in Madison County: Bechtel National, Parsons Corp., Amentum, GP Strategies and Battelle Memorial Institute.
Another round of notices will be coming soon from some of those companies, as about 200 more employees are expected to be released over the next several months, said Mark York, communications manager for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, the joint venture that built and operates the plant.
“This continues our gradual drawdown of employees from the project,” York said.
He said several job fairs have been held for the workers and others are coming up.
Some employees at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant are finding new jobs, York said, some are choosing to retire and others are staying with the company they work for at the plant but moving on to other projects elsewhere.
“We believe our workforce will be an asset to any organization,” York said. “These are people who have worked in very dangerous conditions.”
©2025 Lexington Herald-Leader. Visit kentucky.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
