Falmouth Select Board Calls for Meeting on Planned Machine Gun Range

FALMOUTH – Falmouth Select Board members said that they wanted to meet with officials from Joint Base Cape Cod to discuss a proposed machine gun range at Camp Edwards.

Board members at a recent meeting expressed disappointment that they were not notified sooner about the plan to create the $11 million firing range which will require the clear cutting of 170 acres of forest and has been in development for the last two years.

Select board chairwoman Megan English-Braga said that with the deadline for comment on September 7, she and the vice chairman Douglas Brown sent a letter to the base to ensure that the town had its voice heard.

A formal public forum by the Massachusetts Army National Guard was requested by Town Manager Julian Suso, who said that the forum would help the town keep updated on the project, as the global COVID-19 pandemic has made it more challenging to meet and stay consistently up-to-date with the latest information.

A representative from the base was invited to the recent board meeting as well, but none could attend.  

However, Commander Mathew Porter of the Massachusetts Army National Guard at Camp Edwards did send a response letter saying that more information on the proposed range would be coming soon.

“We will be presenting and distributing a robust information product in the next few weeks that will answer the relevant questions we have received regarding our range project,” wrote Porter in the response which Suso read at the recent meeting.

“We understand the eagerness to discuss this project, but we want to be sure we capture all the important questions and answer them in a thoughtful and succinct manner.”

Brown expressed concern at the lack of communication about the project up until recently.

“It is kind of concerning to me that this review and this process has been going on for two to three years, we have the base leaders come out to us every year and give us an update. It’s unfortunate that we had to find this out in a clip in the newspaper instead in, at least, a letter to us,” said Brown.

Brown said that he worried that the environmental impact review process already being finished meant that it is possible that the project will go through without much input from the town.

Brown also questioned if the base could not re-purpose an old runway or other open space already in the area rather than clearing out part of the forest, which he said was a valuable natural resource.

Board member Douglas Jones said that the project being a surprise to the board was unacceptable and that the town should have been notified in a clear way.

“I’m actually quite angry. With the amount of detail we get in that report every year as to what’s going on at the base, and they did not mention this. I just think that is a real affront to the relationship that they’re trying to establish as being good neighbors of ours, to not tell us that they were thinking about doing this,” said Jones.

“If the research they have been doing has been going on long enough to then get this through, this far in the process, then they clearly knew the last time they came to us that they were planning on it.”

 

About Grady Culhane

Grady Culhane is a Cape Cod native from Eastham. He studied media communications at Cape Cod Community College and joined the CapeCod.com News Center in 2019.



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