Editor,

The Navy League’s recent Sound Off attempt to demean the federal court’s Aug. 2 decision requiring the Navy re-do portions of its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) predictably reflects the league’s disinterest in finding compromise or solutions to the Growler noise problem.

Instead, the league seems to support a position that the Navy is above the law, that no law is a good law if it gets in the way of the Navy, that the Navy should be excused from accounting for its huge greenhouse gas emissions, that the effects of Growler noise on childhood learning or on wildlife pale to Navy interests, and that searching for a more appropriate Growler practice venue is unnecessary — a bad idea.

Conversely, COER maintains that the Navy and its mission, important as both are, should not be above the law, and that laws can be congressionally adjusted when needed to accommodate national defense, as they have in the past. COER respects the federal court’s recent decision demanding the Navy fix its broken EIS and in the meantime consider ways to reduce the multiple impacts.

Under the EIS record of decision total airfield operations at NASWI’s Ault Field were increased by just 13%, while unbelievably, total operations at its Outlying Field (OLF) were increased 271%. Even worse, carrier landing operations—the loudest and most obtrusive of Growler operations—were increased 288% at the OLF, but were decreased by 48% at Ault Field. That dumping on Coupeville is not acceptable or ethical and it cannot stand.

So, in our negotiations with the Navy, COER is advocating to move a major portion of the practices to an off-island site, perhaps El Centro in California, but so far, the Navy has shown no interest. Absent that; COER will have to ask that Ault Field re-shoulder carrier practice operations in line with numbers flown there since the turn of the century.

The Navy League will surely try to argue that there is no room at Ault Field to accommodate those operations, but that would ignore the Navy’s own statistics and misinform the public. That is, a 13% increase of operations at Ault Field cannot remotely justify the transfer of 288% of the operations to the OLF. We hope the Navy League decides to be a part of the solution instead of blindly clinging to its damaging myopia.

Michael Monson

Coupeville