HONOLULU — The Environmental Protection Agency is making moves to disband the elected community advisory board it established as part of a federal consent decree regarding the closure of the Navy’s underground Red Hill fuel storage facility. As it does, it’s facing pushback by the board as well as from Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation.
EPA Region 9 Director Amy Miller told the members of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative during a Wednesday Zoom meeting that the EPA is talking to the Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to find “alternatives” after the CRI resisted calls to bring in a mediator and establish meeting protocols, and that they are seeking to retroactively change the consent order to not include the CRI.
Public meetings have been contentious, with CRI members accusing officials of dodging questions and federal officials accusing CRI members of being disrespectful and going off-topic.
Miller told the board, “I am very, very disappointed that we have gotten to this place. I personally have taken a lot of interest in wanting this unique opportunity to have a community representation initiative approach to engagement. I have seen a lot of value, and I am very disappointed that we weren’t able to come up with mutually agreed-upon ground rules. But that being said, I still want to continue to work with you all.”
The CRI is made up of a mixture of local residents and activists along with people directly affected by the Red Hill water crisis, which began in November 2021 when fuel from the Navy’s bulk Red Hill fuel storage facility entered and contaminated the Navy’s Oahu water system, which serves 93,000 people.
It was established based on community requests for a voice in the defueling and shutdown process. The Red Hill facility sits just 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water. EPA officials will meet with the CRI on Thursday as scheduled, but military officials will not attend.
Miller was met with immediate pushback. During the Zoom meeting, CRI member Walter Chun told Miller, “People in the public put some faith in the consent order because you would put this in there, because the CRI was in there, that there would be representatives of the people that would be able to ask questions, that there would be some kind of a communication thing.”
“By just taking the CRI out of the consent order, you’re really just pulling the rug out from under us and taking whatever little power we had away from us to seek answers for our community,” said CRI member Healani Sonoda-Pale.
CRI Chair Marti Townsend said, “We have always been open to input on the agenda. What we will not cede is control of the agenda, and we don’t want the Navy to have the ability to dictate to us what we’re going to talk about. I think that is where the line is drawn. … By conceding to the military’s pressure in this way, the EPA is undermining its own authority and standing in the community, and it will make it difficult for the EPA (and) embolden the Navy to continue to not be straightforward and honest with the community.”
When asked by CRI members what Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation thought of amending the consent decree to remove the CRI, Miller claimed that in a meeting with representatives of U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, U.S. Rep. Ed Case and U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, each told EPA officials they did not support the initiative. Miller said, “They thought it was out of hand, they thought it needed ground rules, they thought it was disruptive. It was a pretty negative meeting, and it was very, very difficult.”
Lawmakers respond
In a joint statement Thursday, the lawmakers fired back, saying that “any suggestion that the delegation supports disbanding the CRI is baseless and completely inaccurate. The Red Hill fuel leak was a breach of public trust. The federal government has a long way to go to regain it — and that can only happen with strong community engagement and oversight. The EPA and Department of Defense must work directly with the community to clean up Red Hill and keep people safe.”
On Thursday afternoon, the EPA released a statement asserting that “EPA met with members of the CRI yesterday (Wednesday) to discuss continued dialogue between the CRI, the EPA, and the U.S. Navy. In response to questions from members of the CRI, EPA staff relayed that we had briefed staff from the Congressional offices in March about the CRI, but the EPA did not state that the Hawai‘i Congressional delegation was in favor of disbanding the CRI.”
During the Zoom meeting, Miller said the board’s members regularly wanted to talk about issues that were off-topic and beyond the scope of the consent decree, ultimately leading to key issues around water quality and closure issues not actually getting discussed as community members and Navy officials argued.
“We tried to come up with agreed-upon ground rules. We could not reach an agreement with you all,” Miller said. “Therefore, without having an agreement about how these meetings are going to run, we cannot go forward, and we have to consider other alternatives.”
But the CRI argues that’s a dodge by Navy officials to get out of answering questions.
“You have this order, and the Navy has been refusing to comply with the order it consented to,” said David Kimo Frankel, an attorney representing the Sierra Club on the CRI. “They want to control the media narrative … and that is why they so much want to just talk about the ground rules, not talking about water quality. We’ve been talking about ground rules not because we want to do that, (but) because the Navy wanted to. The Navy wants to do that because they want to control information that goes to the public. They didn’t want to have to answer hard questions.”
PR plan
Last week the Navy’s Red Hill closure task force inadvertently released its public communications plan to Honolulu Civil Beat. The document outlined the military’s concern about its public image, and how the public relations fallout could affect military operations in Hawai‘i at a time when the Pacific is considered the Pentagon’s top- priority theater of operations amid simmering regional tensions as China increasingly flexes its military might. Among the Pentagon’s concerns is whether the military will be able to renew leases to state-owned lands it uses for training it considers critical.
A Navy spokesperson at the Pentagon told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the Navy “is committed to a diverse program of engagements with the community as we work with all government agencies and stakeholders to safely and deliberately close the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility underground storage tanks and associated piping system, conduct long-term environmental remediation, and ensure continued access to safe drinking water.”
“Every time we’re talking about Red Hill and the safety of our water, we’re really talking about the presence of the U.S. military in Hawai‘i,” said Townsend. “And we’re talking about these state land leases that are coming up. We’re talking about our decision as a community whether we’re going to continue to live in this kind of relationship with the U.S. military.”
Victim’s comment
Lacey Quintero, the vice chair of the CRI and a Navy spouse who was sickened in the immediate aftermath of the spill, told Miller, “What you have done is completely wasted tax dollars. You have wasted our time. You have put the impacted community through extra trauma they did not deserve. … You pretend to care. You waste money, effort, time and resources to do these fake-ass water reports, call it preliminary, and at the end of the day you find nothing. You’re stringing us along. You’ve delayed, denied, and you took the Navy side on this.”
Miller said that while the EPA, Navy and DLA are talking about an alternative, no final decision has been made and that it would take time to amend the consent decree.
“We have put into motion to start to negotiate but wanted to talk to you first and let you know, but there is already discussions underway among the attorneys,” Miller said. “(But) nothing is done until the order is amended.”
