The Massachusetts National Guard plans to pay the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to conduct a discussion of the impacts of the proposed multipurpose machine gun range. Maybe that is a good idea, maybe it isn’t. What is not a good idea, and is in fact a fatal flaw, is conducting the meeting in secret. There will be no opportunity for the public to hear what is said and to know who is involved or what their affiliations are. There will be no public record of findings and therefore no way to know if what is asserted after the meeting reflects what was actually said at the meeting.
Simply put, this smells. It seems clear that the timing of last week’s announcement of a self-funded session with the NASEM is intended to enable the Guard to mollify anyone concerned with their full steam ahead efforts to sign a construction contract before the end of the month. The persuasion campaign probably sounds a lot like this: “Don’t worry about the contract, we have the NASEM looking at the issues and they will give it a clean bill of health.”
Anyone paying attention in the Healey administration should know, and now has fair warning, that the results of a self-paid private meeting with no set of verifiable findings will not reassure anyone that the legitimate concerns raised by locals and the EPA have been addressed. If anything, this proposed session is just another in a series of already documented efforts by the Guard to sideline and remove the EPA from the discussion.
The Guard had a choice. They could have partnered with EPA to jointly fund a neutral party to conduct a technical session open to the public that produced a set of fully documented and supported findings. Such a meeting, regardless of the results, would have had credibility; the Guard’s secret closed-door approach has none. Rather than easing the path to the signing of the construction contract, the Guard’s approach heightens concerns that arise whenever the public is excluded from critical government deliberations.
