Machine Gun Range

Officials say tours offer the community an opportunity to see where a controversial machine gun range might be placed, learn about the Guard’s water protection and habitat conservation work, and to ask questions about base activities, specifically on Camp Edwards.

This week: Barnstable County can’t agree on how to spend $41 million. A long-awaited report on the Cape’s machine gun range will be awaited quite a bit longer. And “open space vs. affordable housing”: should they really be opponents?

A spokesperson for the federal agency said the report, called a “Sole Source Aquifer Review,” was expected to be released this spring, but the EPA now anticipates it will release a draft by the end of the calendar year.

By creating The Upper Cape Water Supply Reserve in 2002, the state protected two-thirds of the base as conservation land, dedicating the area to the protection of water and wildlife habitat. Military training is allowed as long as it’s “compatible” with that conservation goal, but there’s debate over what the word really means.

Two nearly identical bills say that any time a proposed project on the base would destroy or clearcut 10 or more acres of forest land, a public hearing must be held in an Upper Cape town.

Since August, the E.P.A. has been investigating whether activity on the proposed range could create a significant public health hazard by contaminating the drinking water that runs beneath the base.

For the first time in nearly 20 years, officials with the Massachusetts Army National Guard are offering public tours of Camp Edwards to provide a closer look at the environment on Joint Base Cape Cod.

The federal government is funding the construction of a nearly $8 million machine gun range on a military base northwest of Boston, adding fuel to local leaders’ insistence that another range is not needed on Joint Base Cape Cod.“We’ve got one range ready to break ground, which nullifies the need for a second one,” said Barnstable County Commissioner Mark Forest.

As plans to build a machine gun range on Joint Base Cape Cod move forward amid ongoing opposition, the federal government has just awarded a construction contract to build a similar range at a military training site in Worcester County.

Commissioners and their lawyers claim the Massachusetts Army National Guard failed to comply with legal and permitting requirements during its decade-long pursuit of the range.