The CNMI government insisted Friday for the U.S. Air Force to withdraw its plan to build a divert airfield on Saipan. According to the joint offices of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, the Air Force\u2019s repeated desire to acquire more lands on Saipan runs counter to the legal foundations of the CNMI\u2019s relationship with the United States. Instead, the CNMI government on Friday pointed to the two-thirds of land already leased on Tinian for defense purposes, for this divert airfield.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CNMI has acted in accordance with its end of the agreement,\u201d acting governor Ralph DLG Torres said in his letter Friday, referring to the CNMI Covenant and its accompanying legal texts. \u201cThe United States has not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Torres said the divert project now threatens to undo the touchstone agreement upon which the people of the Northern Marianas Islands agreed to join the American family of states.<\/p>\n
The Friday letter serves as the Office of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor\u2019s official comments to the Air Force\u2019s revised divert airfield project, for which environmental impact documents were released for public scrutiny last October.<\/p>\n
U.S. Air Force officials have insisted that their revised plans for a project on Saipan\u2014and another option called the \u201chybrid plan,\u201d to split this project between Saipan and Tinian\u2014have resulted in a smaller footprint on the scope of the project.<\/p>\n
Fighter aircraft and their associated munitions from the original plan have been completely eliminated, the Air Force has said, with only aircraft likened to commercial airplanes flying in to Saipan for refueling.<\/p>\n
Planned exercise flights have been reduced by more than 60 percent, the Air Force said, and the \u201chybrid option\u201d would distribute operations between Saipan and Tinian and locate the majority of development on Tinian.<\/p>\n
But Torres, in his letter, says the Air Force has missed the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Air Force\u2019s effort to de-conflict the competing use problem and to design the facility it wants to build on Saipan in such a way as to allow future development misses the larger, more significant point,\u201d Torres said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Controlling legal documents\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n In his letter, Torres acknowledges that the Air Force and other military interests for basing or training are particularly strong at the moment, given recent geopolitical developments, and the CNMI islands\u2019 strategic location in the Western Pacific.<\/p>\n However, Torres argued that the founding officials of the CNMI government and their U.S. counterparts foresaw this exact turn of events when they negotiated the Covenant to establish the CNMI nearly 40 years ago.<\/p>\n The CNMI government entered into the Covenant agreement, and provided two-thirds of the island of Tinian and the entire island Farallon de Medinilla to the United States for military defense relations training and joint service air base activity purposes.<\/p>\n Torres said that \u201cto counter any intentions or need to acquire additional real property in the CNMI, the United States agreed to \u2018respect the scarcity and special importance of land in the Northern Marianas Islands\u2019 in future developments and put in place a policy limiting eminent domain powers.\u201d<\/p>\n He said this agreement to \u201crestrict military activities to FDM and Tinian\u201d is contained not only in the Covenant, but also in additional legal documents and leases.<\/p>\n Those documents also include a \u201cTechnical Agreement\u201d that promised a future military-civilian society on Tinian, with shared movie theaters and access to the amenities of a planned base, among others. But these benefits\u2014or a base\u2014have never been realized, some 40 years after the fact.<\/p>\n The same leased lands are now eyed by the U.S. Marine Corps for high-impact live firing ranges.<\/p>\n Torres said Tinian \u201cwas ultimately going to benefit\u201d\u2014for leasing two-thirds of the island to the United States for 100 years\u2014through this air base and its resulting infrastructure improvements.<\/p>\n \u201cThe CNMI has a good faith basis to expect that the divert project should be located entirely on the island of Tinian and, despite our repeated efforts to dissuade the military from including Saipan in its plan, the Revised DEIS continues to do so,\u201d Torres said.<\/p>\n Begin negotiations<\/strong><\/p>\n Torres said that because the \u201cTinian-only\u201d divert option continues to be discounted by the military due to \u201cmonetary costs and timing reasons,\u201d the CNMI must against \u201cre-assert its limited sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026And determination that defense related activities should be located on Tinian as explicitly intended and set out in the Covenant, the technical agreement, and the real property leases,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Torres asked that the military withdraw the Air Force\u2019s modified Saipan alternative, and the hybrid modified alternative.<\/p>\n \u201cThe military\u2019s desire to locate the divert project on Saipan places the CNMI in an awkward and uncomfortable position of appearing to oppose or obstruct the United States\u2019 defense related responsibilities in the NMI,\u201d Torres said. \u201cThis is not true.\u201d<\/p>\n He writes that\u2014as the modified Tinian alternative will require additional property rights through a lease agreement for the divert airport facility and training location\u2014the CNMI is ready to begin negotiations toward that end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The CNMI government insisted Friday for the U.S. Air Force to withdraw its plan to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[418,26,200,57],"class_list":["post-216608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-air-force","tag-cnmi","tag-military","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216608","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=216608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}