Empty happy hours, canceled Indian buffet as government shutdown drags down bar near N.J.'s FAA Tech Center

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Talk about shutdown. What’s shut down at the third exit off the already problematic airport circle, where a sudden Jersey right will get you into the parking lot of Christi’s Bar & Liquor Store/Krishna Indian Cuisine, is the entire kitchen, dining room, and Tandoor oven.

Without the steady business of the employees and contractors at the nearby William J. Hughes Federal Aviation Administration Technical Center — the Tech Center, as it’s known, next to the Atlantic City International Airport — Christi’s owner Kenny Maru has had to lay off six employees and close his kitchen. The whole place is barely hanging on, he says.

Were it not for the billiards league players who show up with their own pool cues tucked in athletic bags, the bar would have no life at all on this weekday Happy Hour, save for a retired pilot and a friend passing through, and the laid-off manager of the Indian buffet that used to serve three or four dozen Tech center employees at lunch every day for $10.95. He’s nursing a draft.

“We are hurting,” Maru said this week during his not-so-happy hour, in which no food was available for the stragglers.

The Tech Center is no stranger to furloughs, shutdowns, and high-wire brushes with funding and reauthorization. Its 2,000 employees, the majority of the 2,500 federal civil employees in Atlantic County, are some of the region’s best-paid and most highly educated, with employees earning an average of $114,000 annually. Many of them are engineers, computer analysts, and scientists and researchers tackling cutting-edge research and analysis related to the nation’s aviation systems.

Some are responsible for deploying modernized air traffic control systems at radar approach control facilities around the country — important work they say has halted.

It’s heady stuff, and this relatively elite workforce cuts a huge swath through the greater Atlantic City economy.

Labor statistics show that in 2016, when the area’s economy was buckling under the fallout of five casino closings, these employees contributed $436 million in gross domestic product to the regional economy.

“The Federal Government Closing has disrupted this flow of funds,” area economist Jim Kennedy noted on Twitter. “It’s about the same economic impact if Harrah’s were to be closed.”

Even the Wawa on the traffic circle that leads to the tech center and Atlantic City International Airport has been sharply affected. Employees there said they are being sent home and hours are being cut.

“Hell to the yeah," said one employee when asked if they’d been affected. “It used to be wall-to-wall people."

The usual after-work gas rush has also evaporated on the circle, employees report.

Wawa corporate spokesperson Lori Bruce did not return a message asking about the shutdown’s impact on Wawa employees.

At Christi’s, the longtime staple on the circle that Maru purchased a year and a half ago — regulars remember it once was a go-go bar called the Landing Strip — daytime bartender Cari Law said that even the usually maddening circle seemed devoid of its crush of cars in recent weeks.

Law was sweeping floors of an empty Christi’s on Thursday, during what used to be the busy buffet lunch hour. She’d had just one person in all day, on his way to drop off a car at a nearby dealer; he ordered a $2.75 Budweiser draft and left her $2 as a tip.

“This was the restaurant,” she said, showing the darkened dining room behind a locked door. “The buffet was full. Everyone loved it. He couldn’t sustain it.”

Law herself is retired from a career as a software engineer at the Tech Center. Her husband is a meteorological engineer who, like many, contracts with the FAA. Unlike the federal employees, his lost work will not be reimbursed at the end of the shutdown.

“They have stop-work orders,” Law said. “That whole month is out.”

Bob Challendar, president of the American Federation of Government Workers, Local 200, representing Tech Center workers, said the fallout has been severe.

He estimated that about 1,000 Tech Center workers are working without pay; another 1,000 are furloughed; and a further 1,000 are contractors who will not make up the lost pay. A private day-care center operating at the center is at risk of losing licensed employees, he said.

He’s helping organize a rally on the circle Friday, involving his union and three others representing federal workers. He has urged members to patronize Christi’s and the Wawa during the protest, and to donate food for the Coast Guard unit that shares space behind the Tech Center gate.

“It gets worse every day,” said Challender, who is furloughed from his job as an information systems specialist (his specialty is “policies, procedures, and processes” related to organizational effectiveness).

“This may be the last thing I can pull myself together to do,” he said. “I’ve gone through getting fired, employees reinstated, shutdown after shutdown after shutdown. This one is different. This one is emotionally crippling.”

He said many Tech Center employees are married to someone who also works at the center or is a private contractor, affecting the paychecks of both for two pay periods in a row. Most are carrying mortgages and paying tuitions.

“They are all running out of time,” he said. “They are looking like zombies. Ask anybody how they could do without four paychecks."

William Pomales, a 29-year government employee, said he was working on deploying those state-of-the-art air traffic control systems when he was furloughed in December. Divorced, he’s now got $99 in his checking account, he said, and is responsible for two mortgages.

“They’re using 40-year-old technology,” he said of places like West Virginia, where he was due to deploy the modernized equipment. “Those displays are supposed to be replaced.”

Challender said recruitment into these government jobs would be hurt by the shutdown. And he also said the shutdown slows the delivery and rollout of high-tech systems undergoing testing and development at the Tech Center.

“New air traffic control capabilities are not being delivered into the air traffic control system,” he said.

A message to FAA Tech Center spokesperson Rick Breitenfeldt was returned with an automatic reply: “Due to the lapse in government funding, I am out of the office."

A message to a Washington-based FAA spokesperson yielded: “Overall, the traveling public can be assured that our nation’s airspace system is safe. Air traffic controllers and the technicians who maintain the nation’s airspace system continue working as they fill a critical mission to ensure the public’s safety.”

Atlantic County Executive Dennis Levinson downplayed the impact of the shutdown on the region’s economy, and said he was most worried about the 38,000 county residents who rely on government assistance for food. He said the county had doubled the allotment before the shutdown to, in theory, carry residents through January and February.

"I"m worried about those that are most vulnerable," he said. “We are in a situation where our social institutions are overrun. Our food bank will be overrun.”

As for the tech workers, he said, “There’s a $114,000 average salary there. These are extraordinarily intelligent and well-educated technical employees. You can stay home and cook your own meal and watch TV. At least for right now, it doesn’t have the chilling effect on our county. I believe the businesses around the tech center, they’re being affected. Of course they’re being affected. The people are not coming to work."