The proposed Mariana Islands Training and Testing Study Area, or MITT, had its first scoping meetings recently on Guam.
The drill is familiar: the slick blowups of the printed presentations; the one-on-one question format, discouraging open public discussion; and above all, the mind numbing schedule laid out under the National Environmental Protection Act process that will produce a final Record of Decision on the MITT proposal in the Spring of 2015. The scoping sessions are part of the requirements under the federal law which also applied to the buildup, resulting in what by general consensus turned out to be a deeply flawed roadmap of that project.
As a handout blandly describes MITT, “The Mariana Islands provide distinctive conditions, an ideal setting and proximity to major concentrations of U.S. military forces for essential and effective training activities.” More specifically, that means active SONAR training and testing in thousands of square miles of the waters surrounding Guam. It means training and testing with live ordnance and other explosives in these same waters and more restrictions on civilians in the area.
Persuasive arguments are made that this enhances the safety and combat readiness of American forces, though when possible, simulation is used for training. “Simulation, however, cannot completely replace training and testing in a real-world environment.” However, the question that could and should be asked is why the boundaries of the proposed MITT have been radically expanded, compared with the present Mariana Islands Range Complex?
The MITT area is as large as the United States was at the end of the Revolutionary War. It is the same as covering the area from the East Coast to the Mississippi River and from Pensacola and New Orleans all the way to Chicago and Minneapolis. That is about one thousand miles across East to West and one thousand miles North to South, stretching from Palau to far north of Farallon de Medinilla.
Is it any wonder then, that many questions are already being asked, some of them by me. Is there anything comparable to this off the West Coast of the U.S. or Hawaii? How does the NEPA process apply to open ocean a thousand miles from Guam? If the plan is to do combat training with high explosives and SONAR, why refer to this as a “study area,” unless the intent is to mislead?
Our Guam community of fishermen, tracing its roots back to prehistory and already restricted from fishing in many off-shore areas by the military, is wondering about its future in light of this. The MITT plans appear to call for even more severe restrictions on fishing anywhere near Farallon de Medinilla and would cover popular fishing areas in international waters.
Will the NEPA process really reflect the concerns of local fishermen? I have my doubts about that too. While I am hopeful that lessons learned from the Guam military buildup will be applied to the proposed MITT, I think all of us in Guam should approach this with a skeptical point of view and some pointed questions when the opportunity presents itself.
As has been made clear during the latest round of scoping meetings, the intent is to eliminate opportunities for frank, open public discussion.
We’re going to need a lot more up front reassurance that local concerns are recognized and addressed.
I think many of our citizens learned a valuable lesson from the buildup EIS, which is that we can’t simply sit back and assume that officials will do right by Guam and the huge chunk of its surrounding environment involved in the MITT. The Secretaries of State, Defense, Interior, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Pfannenstiel, NOAA, and the EPA will shortly receive my scoping comments. This situation calls for your vigilance and attention and I promise that I will do whatever I can to ferret out the information that we need to understand and shape the MITT.
SEN. JUDI GUTHERTZ
31st Guam Legislature
