US military still hopes CNMI plans can work

Transcript

A top US military official says a second draft environmental impact statement around controversial plans for the Northern Marianas demonstrates it's following a thorough process.

Last week the military announced a second draft after the deadline passed for feedback on the first, which included strong opposition around live-fire training plans.

The US Marine Corps Forces Pacific executive director, Craig Whelden, told Koro Vaka'uta the training plans need further analysis.

CRAIG WHELDEN: There was a six month period by where we took comments from many, many different sources, we received over nine thousand comments, eight thousand of them were on form letters, which were signatures, but the other thousand were individual submissions.  We then received a petition from a website with a 120,000 signatures, and 18,000 of those petitions had comments associated with them as well.  So we have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 27,000 comments that we have to work our way through to assess what the impressions are from both the public and the government on proposed action.  We have been working closely with a number of regulatory agencies and with the government of the CNMI and it became evident that one of the concerns raised involved water on Tinian and the impact of the proposed action on the water on Tinian, and the coral surrounding both Tinian and Pagan, the concerns were significant enough that we believe that a supplemental analysis, and that's essentially what it is.  We are going to supplement the draft EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) a deeper dive, further study as we work our way through all the other comments, we will determine or not whether any of those warrant inclusion in the supplemental analysis, there by requiring further study.

KORO VAKA'UTA: You mention the Governor, we did have a report earlier, in terms of a cover letter that he had in his comments to the EIS describing the proposed actions as an existential threat. How does that harm the proposal you are going through or the proposal that you are even doing?

CW:  His submission was a cover letter attached to his consultants analysis, that says as proposed his actions represents an existential threat to our tourism driven economy, our fragile eco-system, our cultural resources and indeed our way of life, that's a pretty broad statement as to what impact our proposed actions have, we have to get into the details of the submission exactly what he and the consultant are talking about, and get more specificity before we can address what mitigation or changes might be required.

KV: The opponents, they have sent to this supplementary statement, a moral victory of sorts , your listening to their concerns allaying them, do you agree with that?

CW: Well, I don't know if I would call it a moral victory, the process is running its course the way it's suppose to run, and that's one of the beauties of living in a democratic society, we have laws which we are required to follow, this one happens to be a national environmental law, I believe, I mean, we believe we are following it exactly as it requires us to.

KV: Are you still confident of getting a workable solution for both sides?

CW: I am hopeful that we will bridge differences as best we can, there's an argument that we have national security concerns as a nation and the CNMI is part of the United States through it's covenant relationship, on the other hand it's a very small location and the islands are small and the impact of this proposed action is pretty significant, I recognise that.