A machine gun range on prime land on Joint Base Cape Cod is not the highest and best use of this property. It is close to the worst and lowest possible. We are already spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up past military misuse of this Super Fund site.
If the girls' volley ball team from Great Barrington can make a 440 mile round trip to play Nantucket, as it just did, surely the National Guard can travel 1 hour and 40 minutes from here to the brand new machine gun range just funded for Fort Devens.
Cape Cod is desperate for land for Affordable and attainable housing, for both renters and homeowners. 170 acres, or even 100, would make a severe dent in our over-priced housing market. 30-70% of the cost of housing is in the cost of the land. How about Joint Base Cape Cod leasing land for, say, 99 years, for a nominal amount, to Housing Assistance Corp or another entity that could develop it for mixed incomes? Imaginative design could provide attractive housing for several hundred families currently priced out of Cape Cod real estate.
The local economy would benefit from employees not having to commute from off-Cape.
Trees are removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Removing hundreds of trees to make room for flying bullets is counter-environmental.
Our next wars are more likely to be fought countering cyber-attacks than trench warfare. Machine guns are 20th century weapons, not 21st.
President Biden's just-passed infrastructure bill includes funding for two new bridges over the Cape Cod Canal. Use of those bridges is constrained by lack of a good connection between Route 6 and the Bourne Bridge. A connecting highway would probably bisect the proposed machine gun range.
For the above reasons and many more, Governor Baker should make this machine gun range not happen.
A machine gun range on prime land on Joint Base Cape Cod is not the highest and best use of this property. It is close to the worst and lowest possible. We are already spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up past military misuse of this Super Fund site.
If the girls' volley ball team from Great Barrington can make a 440 mile round trip to play Nantucket, as it just did, surely the National Guard can travel 1 hour and 40 minutes from here to the brand new machine gun range just funded for Fort Devens.
Cape Cod is desperate for land for Affordable and attainable housing, for both renters and homeowners. 170 acres, or even 100, would make a severe dent in our over-priced housing market. 30-70% of the cost of housing is in the cost of the land. How about Joint Base Cape Cod leasing land for, say, 99 years, for a nominal amount, to Housing Assistance Corp or another entity that could develop it for mixed incomes? Imaginative design could provide attractive housing for several hundred families currently priced out of Cape Cod real estate.
The local economy would benefit from employees not having to commute from off-Cape.
Trees are removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Removing hundreds of trees to make room for flying bullets is counter-environmental.
Our next wars are more likely to be fought countering cyber-attacks than trench warfare. Machine guns are 20th century weapons, not 21st.
President Biden's just-passed infrastructure bill includes funding for two new bridges over the Cape Cod Canal. Use of those bridges is constrained by lack of a good connection between Route 6 and the Bourne Bridge. A connecting highway would probably bisect the proposed machine gun range.
For the above reasons and many more, Governor Baker should make this machine gun range not happen.