THE ASSOCIATION to Preserve Cape Cod has reviewed the Massachusetts National Guard’s modifications to the new proposed multipurpose machine gun range at Joint Base Cape Cod and has concluded that the project continues to fail to protect the Upper Cape water supply from contamination. The entire proposal, modified or not, should be rejected.

The National Guard’s new proposal was included in EPA Region 1’s response to inquiries from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey and Rep. Michael Keating about the status of the environmental agency’s determination that the machine gun range represented a significant public health threat.

The National Guard’s proposal, which the public has not had the opportunity to review or comment on, fails to eliminate or meaningfully reduce the core threats to the water supply that were identified in the EPA’s review.  

The proposal rejects most of the EPA’s pollution prevention recommendations intended to help safeguard the region’s drinking water. Instead, the proposal includes a reduction in the project size from approximately 1.3 million bullets fired per year to approximately 800,000 bullets fired per year. The reduction would still far surpass what is currently used in training on the base, amounting to triple the number of bullets currently fired per year.

The National Guard’s revised proposal would rely on infrequent bullet collection, once every 10 years, along with infrequent monitoring to detect and then attempt to clean up contamination in the soil—and potentially in the aquifer—after it has already occurred. This is the same pattern of behavior that created the Superfund site at Joint Base Cape Cod, where $1.2 billion has so far been spent cleaning up hazardous waste.

As stated in EPA’s April 4, 2024 letter to the congressional delegation, “No additional scientific analyses were provided [by the National Guard] to address the risk and uncertainty of a large-scale expansion of pollutant loading.”

The National Guard’s proposal continues to rely on reacting to contamination that has occurred rather than on preventing contamination of the aquifer. Perpetuating such poor stewardship of the land and Cape Cod’s water resources is too risky and is unacceptable.

The Association to Preserve Cape Cod is equally concerned about the possibility that the National Guard’s proposal to reduce the project size is merely a project segmentation maneuver with the full intention to come back later to complete the range. If allowed, the phasing of the project would avoid scrutiny of the impact of the whole project. Segmentation of projects is prohibited under the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act.

The National Guard has proposed to the EPA that it intends to reduce the machine gun range footprint from two of the ten 800-meter lanes and eliminate all of the 1,500-meter machine gun lanes. Up until this point, the National Guard has steadfastly insisted that ten firing lanes were necessary, and that the 1,500-meter lanes were needed to meet the Department of Defense’s training requirements.

However, when the National Guard sought construction bids for the project, the bid costs were more than $15 million, which exceeded the $9.2 million appropriated for the project. With the National Guard facing a funding shortfall and an appropriation that expires on October 1, 2024, the association wonders if the proposed project reduction is not a serious response to EPA but rather just a segmentation scheme to bring the construction cost in line with the funds already appropriated for the project in order to get the project on the ground.

In this scenario, the National Guard would then seek additional funding to fully build out the project, adding back the lanes removed now in supposed response to the EPA concerns. The National Guard could take this scenario off the table, but so far the organization has refused to comment, adding credence to the premise that they intend to segment.

It is evident that the National Guard’s proposal fails to address the EPA’s valid concerns about the threats the machine gun range poses for the Cape’s sole source aquifer or the health and welfare of the residents of Cape Cod. Indeed, the association agrees with the EPA’s April 2023 provisional determination that, “it is uncertain that any combination of operations, maintenance, and monitoring practices can adequately reduce the potential to contaminate the aquifer so as to create a significant public health hazard.”

The association urges EPA to reject the National Guard’s inadequate proposal for the machine gun range and to expeditiously finalize the draft finding.

Andrew Gottlieb is executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod.