The public has spoken; now the U.S. Coast Guard will digest comments on the agency's plans to designate 34 zones for live-fire machine gun training across the Great Lakes.
About 750 people attended nine public meetings on the issue across the Great Lakes, including one in Duluth, and more than 550 comments have been submitted to the formal docket.
It's not yet clear how the Coast Guard will react to public concerns. The training zones were announced last summer to the surprise of the public and many members of Congress. Great Lakes lawmakers asked that the Coast Guard suspend the plans for zones, and any live-fire training, and hold the public meetings.
With the last meeting now complete, it probably will be several months until the Coast Guard commander of the Great Lakes, Rear Adm. John E. Crowley, Jr., makes a decision on the issue.
"We haven't analyzed the comments ... yet, because they are still coming in," said Chief Petty Officer Robert Lanier, spokesman for the Coast Guard's Great Lakes headquarters in Cleveland. "But I've been to all nine of the meetings, and the general consensus is environmental concerns, (public) notification of the exercises and public safety -- those are the big issues. It's going to take a while, likely many months, until we get a final decision."
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Until then, Crowley has suspended all live-fire training exercises, Lanier noted. The final version of the training plan could look very similar to the original plan, or it could have fewer, more, larger or smaller zones, Lanier said.
It's also likely the agency will beef up its pretraining public notification efforts to increase public awareness and safety of each event. The agency has said it studied the potential effects of lead pollution and that the spent bullets would have no impact on water quality.
TO COMMENT
The public has until 11:59 p.m. Nov. 13 to comment on the Coast Guard's plan to develop live-fire zones on the Great Lakes:
E-mail comments through the web site for the Docket Management System at http://dms.dot.gov/ . Docket #25767.
Fax comments to the Docket Management Facility at (202) 493-2251.
Mail comments to the Docket Management Facility (USCG-2006-2567), U.S. Department of Transportation, Room PL-401, 400 SW, Washington, D.C. 20590-0001.
