{"id":185798,"date":"2014-11-25T04:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T18:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=185798"},"modified":"2014-11-25T04:00:09","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T18:00:09","slug":"military-will-gather-public-input-tinian-pagan-eis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/military-will-gather-public-input-tinian-pagan-eis\/","title":{"rendered":"Military will gather public input on Tinian, Pagan EIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Zimmerman\"<\/a>
Zimmerman<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThe Environmental Impact Statement for Tinian and Pagan for the U.S. military\u2019s planned use of Tinian and Pagan is expected to be out in March, but this early the military is assuring the CNMI that the community\u2019s input on the EIS will be gathered in a series of public hearings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe EIS is still ongoing. Probably in March the draft will be released. The draft of the EIS will come out and it will tell you what we\u2019ve been doing the last year since we did scoping. We will have public hearing on Tinian and Saipan,\u201d said Marine Corps Activity Guam officer-in-charge Col. P. J. Zimmerman, who is currently on Saipan to meet with island leaders. <\/p>\n

He said the military would also conduct briefings for government officials. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s a 60-day period for public comment and sometime during that window we will give people a chance to review. They will address every input that they\u2019ll get. Currently they\u2019re conducting these ad-hoc meetings between the government officials of the Commonwealth and MarForPac planners and they\u2019ve come out here four or five times over the last year and spent five days with officials of Tinian and with CNMI agency officials to go over the different options.\u201d <\/p>\n

As officer-in-charge of Marine Corps Activity Guam, Zimmerman said his role is to build relationships between the military and the people of the region.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy role here is to build relationships. I\u2019m not necessarily one of the planners of the EIS that\u2019s going on. I\u2019m here for community relations and to open communications. I\u2019m the guy here in the region locally. I\u2019m in Guam and I come up here and met with everyone interested in knowing more of the Marine Corps. If there\u2019s a perceived gap, I\u2019m more than happy to help engage and explain the Marine Corps\u2019 position and where we are on the planning process. <\/p>\n

Earlier this month Saipan Chamber of Commerce president Alex Sablan scored the military\u2019s insistence of putting a planned divert airfield on Saipan instead of Tinian.<\/p>\n

Sablan wrote in the organization\u2019s monthly newsletter that placing the divert airfield on Tinian will have a substantial benefit on the island, while establishing it on Saipan will have a negative effect on the island\u2019s recovering tourism industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Environmental Impact Statement for Tinian and Pagan for the U.S. military\u2019s planned use of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":185803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,1229,200,67],"class_list":["post-185798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-marine-corps","tag-military","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}