BELFAST — Little River Apparel, a Belfast manufacturer of specialized military clothing that employs people with disabilities, announced Monday it would lay off half of its employees in the next two months.

The business, part of Group Home Foundation Inc., currently has roughly 120 workers at a 50,000 square foot facility on Little River Drive in the Belfast Business Park. Sixty are expected to lose their jobs by March.

The reason, according Salvatore Garozzo, executive director of GHF told the Bangor Daily News, has to do with a slowing in overseas military operations. Little River Apparel’s main contract is with the U.S. Department of Defense, for whom Belfast workers have produced around 5,000 chemical warfare suits per month. According to the BDN, that number has dropped to 2,667.

LRA Manufacturing was started by Group Home Foundation in 1997 to provide more employment opportunities for people with disabilities in Waldo County. The major product has been the JSLIST Chemical Protective Overgarment, which the Department of Defense considers to be a critical life support product requiring stringent quality standards in manufacuring.

These standards were cause for temporary layoffs in 2011, when an issue with adhesion between elements of the material paused operations at the Belfast plant. LRA has been one of the major employers in Waldo County. The anticipated cuts in Belfast would bring the ranks to a quarter of the number employed in 2011

LRA Manufacturing’s contract with the Defense Department stems from the Javits Wagner O’Day Act, enacted in 1973, which enables the federal government to set aside goods and services to be produced by organizations that serve people with a significant disability. The AbilityOne Program, as it is now known, requires that 75-percent of the labor required to manufacture products be performed by people with a significant disability. 

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com