The Massachusetts Army National Guard’s plan was straightforward.
Military officials wanted to build an eight-lane machine gun range across 5,000 acres of Joint Base Cape Cod (JBCC) that would help cut down on soldier travel time to other machine gun ranges across the Northeast. Potentially negative environmental impacts would be offset, they said, and service members would be better prepared for deployment.
But from the moment locals caught wind of it, the proposed range created a divide. Some locals who spoke out at meetings and hearings in recent years said they were all for it. But the idea deeply worried other community members — a lot of them.
The concerns included wildlife disruption, and the fact that gunfire noise would be heard from an elementary school. But most of all, residents feared groundwater pollution. The Guard’s plan called for the range to be built atop an aquifer, which meant possibly contaminating drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Cape Codders — an aquifer that had already been contaminated by past military activity on the base, which remains a Superfund cleanup site.
Ultimately, over a stretch of more than four years, the range project would be scrutinized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), two sitting governors, and Congress. Then, late last month, the Guard — which has chosen not to comment — watched its project fall apart.
The story of exactly how that happened begins with a few key actions by one environmental group: the Association to Preserve Cape Cod.
“Let’s put it this way: I’ve seen the picket signs. I’ve seen the inflammatory rhetoric that APCC in general and me in particular are the villains here,” said Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of APCC. “Comes with the territory.”
The emails that the Guard didn’t want the public to see
To be fair, Gottlieb noted, opposition to the range came from multiple stakeholders. County officials, town officials, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, and other environmental organizations spoke out.
“It wasn’t just, `There goes APCC again,’” he said.
But he can take credit for several critical instances where APCC gained access to Guard documents and emails through Freedom of Information Act requests. Those disclosures resulted in major revelations and a groundswell of public opposition to the range.
In one email exchange that APCC obtained, a top Guard official said the machine gun range could not sustain the scrutiny of a more intensive environmental review. That same official, in another message, threatened to have troops boycott Cape Cod shops unless the local business community expressed support for the project.
“You know, if you’re an institution, whether you’re the Guard or anybody else, you can muscle your way through people for only so long,” Gottlieb said. “And when it doesn’t work for you, the resentment backlash is significant.”
APCC parlayed that backlash into a constituent request for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and Representative Bill Keating, whose district includes the base. They urged the EPA to study whether the range would impact the aquifer. That pressure from the congressional delegation, along with a citizens’ petition started by a Cape Cod resident, led EPA officials to say they were convinced that a review was warranted.
“When the credibility of EPA came along,” Gottlieb said, “it wasn’t then just a bunch of local cranks, but it was an agency whose expertise in this particular area exceeds that of everybody else involved.”
In 2023, after nearly two years of scrutiny, the EPA released a draft report that said the range could, in fact, contaminate drinking water. And that, in retrospect, was the moment when the project’s eventual collapse was set in motion.
A deadline dash for the money
This past summer, members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation used the existence of the EPA’s draft report to block the Guard from accessing $9.7 million in previously approved funding for the range unless it did so by the end of September.
“With this negative preliminary report,” Warren told CAI in June, 2024, “I didn’t want to spend taxpayer dollars to start moving forward on something that might never be a reality.”
As September deadline approached, the Guard raced to get a building contract in place. But the contract needed the approval of Governor Maura Healey. Ultimately, using her authority as commander in chief of the Guard, she blocked the execution of that contract. One key rationale for Healey’s decision, according to a statement from her office, was the fact that the environmental review remained incomplete.
“The governor took a strong stand in support of the water supply protections. And I think that that stand came at some political exposure,” Gottlieb said. “And so it’s hard for me to envision a scenario in which Guard officials come back under her administration and propose something roughly the same as what was denied to them.”
The governor had the power all along to kill the project — as past governors have done to similar machine gun range proposals in the last 30 years — but she waited until the final moments of funding availability to deal the fatal blow. Whether her decision was driven by political considerations, environmental concerns, or other considerations, her team wouldn’t say.
‘What have we learned? Where do we go?’
EPA officials are operating as if the project remains alive. They’re attending a meeting with the Guard at the end of this month, with the assumption that they still need to finalize their draft report on the aquifer.
But the Guard seems to be sending a different signal. At a recent Mashpee Select Board meeting, Major Alex McDonough, who manages JBCC operations, was asked whether the Guard has a plan to move forward with the range. He explained how damaging it was that the range no longer has the previously approved $9.7 million in military construction funding — what he called “milcon.”
“ There is no milcon funding,” he told the Board. “The amount of money needed for that range would require that. So I’m not aware of any plans to move forward.”
It’s as close as the Guard might get to waving a white flag. Without an official statement, there’s no way to know for certain. But environmental advocates hope the Guard will ultimately be satisfied sending its soldiers from the Cape to a machine gun range under construction at Fort Devens, northwest of Boston.
“So now the question is… what have we learned? Where do we go?” said Mark Forest, a Barnstable County commissioner who helped lead the opposition. “Where we go next is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The county government lobbied hard against the range. But now, Forest said he and his fellow commissioners are working with military officials, the Cape Cod Commission, and housing experts with Mass Development to secure a more collaborative future for Joint Base Cape Cod.
“You can do more training on the southern portion of the base,” he said. “You can do more to support emergencies and disaster preparedness. You can do more to provide housing for both the military and the surrounding community.”
There are a lot of things the base could be used for, Forest said. But as long as the concerns of the community are being heard, a machine gun range isn’t likely to be one of them.
CAI’s coverage of the proposed machine gun range for Joint Base Cape Cod spans more than 55 individual published news reports since 2020, when reporter Eve Zuckoff first spotted a small public notice buried in the newspaper classifieds. Since that time, details on the project have been discussed at length on more than 30 CAI on-air news programs.
You can explore our collected coverage of the machine gun range here.
Copyright 2024 CAI
