[CPEO-MEF] MUNITIONS, REUSE: Camp Bonneville (WA) editorial

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

In Our View: Clean up the Camp
Stubborn blame-deflection continues as Camp Bonneville project is 
delayed again
Editorial
The Columbian (WA)
May 25, 2010

Which will be cleaned up first, the Gulf of Mexico or Clark County's 
Camp Bonneville? If you can answer that question, you're smarter than 
three layers of officials with Clark County, the state Department of 
Ecology and the U.S. Army.
Camp Bonneville is a 3,840-acre site in east county that's so beautiful 
as to have the county drooling over the possibility of turning it into a 
park, perhaps with a veterans cemetery. But the abandoned artillery 
range is infested with an unmeasured load of unexploded ordnance left 
over from 86 years' use by the Army. More than $28.6 million has been 
spent trying to clean up the site. But as Erik Robinson reported in 
Saturday's Columbian, the state and the county are in the process of 
firing subcontractor Mike Gage, president of the nonprofit Bonneville 
Conservation Restoration and Renewal Team. That is just a formality, 
though. Gage stopped working late last year, claiming the Army failed to 
fully explain how extensive the project would be, arguing it would cost 
far more than what was provided in his contract.
There's got to be a way for this problem to be solved. Local, state and 
federal officials owe it to local residents. But do those two statements 
sound familiar? Yes, it's the same argument we've made for the Hanford 
nuclear reservation in the Tri-Cities area: The feds made the mess; the 
feds should clean it up. If only it were that simple.

...

For the entire editorial, see
http://www.columbian.com/news/2010/may/25/clean-up-the-camp/

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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