A CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter on display outside the MCAS Headquarters building at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, S.C., in 2015. (Cpl. Samantha Foster)
(Tribune News Service) — Hundreds of furloughed employees at U.S. Marine Corps bases in Beaufort and Port Royal, S.C., returned to work this week following the 43-day federal government shutdown.
The country’s longest government shutdown, which began Oct. 1, quickly hit home locally when civilian employees who work on local bases were sent home from work. They received no pay during the six weeks they were not on the job.
Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Yarbrough, a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, said 133 furloughed civilian employees from the Port Royal base alone returned to work on Thursday.
The furloughed employees will receive back pay, Yarbrough said.
Service members were paid for the entire government shutdown.
“We continued to make Marines on time and continued to graduate without issue,” Yarbrough said of base operations during the shutdown.
Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island is the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting and basic training installation for the Eastern Region of the United States. In addition to the roughly 10,000 to 17,000 recruits who are trained each year at the base, 2,000 permanent active-duty Marines and 800 civilian employees work there.
The loss of those civilian employees impacted various sections of the base, including administrative, public works and “outfacing” services like the museum. The ID/CAC Card Processing center, which is responsible for issuing passes and identification cards and registering vehicles of visitors, was also affected, Yarbrough said. The Marines had limited public outreach, however, they did promote events like concerts and the local Veterans Day parade.
The shutdown fell during the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps, which was Nov. 10, 1775.
On Wednesday, Parris Island celebrated its uniform pageant day, an annual event in which Marines wear vintage and modern uniforms representing different eras of the Corps history. The 250th anniversary was woven into that event, Yarbrough said.
The base also was scheduled to celebrate the Recruit Training Birthday Ball, a formal event celebrating the service’s founding, on Friday.
David Trail, a spokesman at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, said a third of the base’s civilians who are paid with Congressionally-appropriated funds were furloughed during the shutdown and returned to work on Thursday.
Known as “Fightertown East,” MCAS Beaufort is home to F/A-18 Hornets and F-35B Lightning IIs. It supports about 4,000 military personnel, their families and civilian employees.
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