“Spitting in Our Faces”: Sierra Club Statement on the EPA and Navy Decision to Muzzle the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative

HONOLULU, HAWAIʻI – The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi executive director Wayne Chung Tanaka today issued the following statement regarding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA's) and Navy’s decision, announced yesterday, to severely limit the work of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative (CRI) originally established under their 2023 Administrative Consent Order:

“Just last week, the Department of Defense Inspector General released three damning reports confirming the Navy’s leadership culture of carelessness, hubris, and state of denial that led to the Red Hill water crisis and that persists to this day.

Now, we have been informed that the EPA has agreed with this same institutional culprit to strip away almost all of the powers of the Red Hill CRI, which for over a year has been a leading voice for transparency and accountability, and served as the one forum that poisoned families and Hawai‘i residents have been able to rely upon, to raise questions and demand answers regardless of how inconvenient the Navy may find such matters. 

The EPA’s nickel and diming of the Red Hill CRI’s limited powers, beginning with its refusal to enforce Navy officials’ attendance requirements, to its refusal to support requests for alternative drinking water sources for Navy water consumers after dozens of health and water quality complaints, to its failed attempts to disband the CRI, has now culminated in an agreement to impose final lame duck ‘ground rules’ for the CRI that are, quite frankly, akin to spitting in our faces:

Navy officials will now be able to unilaterally dictate what items are able to be discussed by the CRI and what questions may be asked of them, with no conflict resolution or review process to address clearly arbitrary and erroneous decisions on their part.

Members of the public will be given only 30 minutes every three months to raise their concerns with the CRI, whose members will be forced to act as brick walls - forbidden from even responding to the most egregious situations and pressing questions that may be raised.

And the CRI will be forbidden from addressing any matter, no matter how dire or concerning, that occurs less than three weeks before a scheduled CRI meeting.

That these amendments were made with no opportunity for public review or input – after nearly 2,000 written comments and hours of oral testimony were shared with the EPA regarding their original, toothless draft 2023 Administrative Consent Order - also makes clear the EPA’s and Navy’s obvious disregard for the Hawai‘i community at large, as well as the service members and families whose lives were upended by the Navy’s malfeasance.

The Sierra Club of Hawai‘i reiterates its call for our local leaders and Congressional Delegation to stand with and for the community, and to demand that the EPA and Navy undo this outrageous attempt to silence the Red Hill CRI and by extension, all who have been affected or remain under threat by the Navy’s poisoning of our most precious resource.”

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