The military buildup on the Tinian Westfield Airport will be kept north of its runway\u2014granting a clear separation between civilian and military assets, as well as allowing for a consolidated use of property by any Department of Defense entity, according to both CNMI and military officials yesterday.<\/p>\n
This is was made clear between the Commonwealth Ports Authority and DOD yesterday during their talks on a proposed airport layout plan inclusive of the military\u2019s plan to build on the Tinian airport.<\/p>\n
Whether consolidated military use of the airport property could make the area a more attractive divert airfield alternative\u2014over the preferred Saipan alternative\u2014remains to be seen. This question was posed to CPA executive director Maryann Lizama yesterday. She said both the Air Force and the Marines are collaborating to \u201cincorporate their needs on one ALP.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe meeting [yesterday] covered both the Air Force and the Marines,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In the meeting, CPA established that \u201cany and all [DOD] activities shall be situated in the north side [of the airport] to have that separation\u201d and not \u201c intermingle civilians with military\u201d and \u201ccivilian assets and resources with military assess and resources,\u201d Lizama said.<\/p>\n
DOD officials\u2014from the U.S. Pacific Command, Pacific Air Force, and Marine Forces Pacific\u2014all agreed to this, according to MARFORPAC Defense Policy Review Initiative Planning Group Operations officer Tim Robert.<\/p>\n
In their previous plans, DOD was separated on both the north and south side of the airport, according to Robert, but now they are moving towards \u201cone DOD location.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we can consolidate all our facilities. Instead of having two parking ramps, two maintenance facilities, two fuel storage tanks on the north and south side, we can put it all on one side. \u2026We don\u2019t have to go back forth, north and south of the airfield. It helps us consolidate our operations and helps deconflict from civilian operations on the south side,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He described the development as \u201cjoint-DOD facilities,\u201d saying these facilities \u201cwould kind of spread out across the north side\u201d of the airfield for use by not just the Marines or the Air Force, but also for \u201cany other DOD entity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moving forward, Lizama said that is now up to MARFORPAC, PACAF, and PACOM to come together and incorporate their infrastructural plans into the ALP.<\/p>\n
CPA will then see if this ALP imposes or overlaps with areas that they have plans to build on, she said. When the consolidated ALP comes to CPA, discussions to \u201cfine-tune\u201d the plans for CPA approval will move forward, before they submit the plan to the Federal Aviation Administration.<\/p>\n
Robert called the meeting a \u201cbreakthrough\u201d in that both sides are now able to talk details and move forward with a proposed ALP. He described a parking ramp, cargo pads, fuel storage tanks, specific facilities related to arming and disarming aircraft, and potential for a pipeline to be installed from the Tinian port to the fuel tanks at the airport as some of the \u201cthe general big facilities\u201d proposed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The military buildup on the Tinian Westfield Airport will be kept north of its runway\u2014granting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900,4],"tags":[1535,124,1173,200],"class_list":["post-190715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-local-news","tag-alp","tag-cpa","tag-dod","tag-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190715","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\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}