To some, Everett’s citizens may have seemed hypocritical. One day, they were gathering in droves to welcome home their heroes on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shouting to all the world that they were proud to be a Navy town. At the same time, many of them were working feverishly to keep another military installation — the SBX radar platform — out of Naval Station Everett.
It wasn’t hypocrisy. It was grassroots activism, and its leaders deserve kudos for opening the community’s eyes to what could have been a very bad deal for the city.
So our hats are off to Michelle Trautman, Mary Jane Anderson and the rest of Concerned Citizens Against the SBX. Their aggressive campaign to keep the 25-story behemoth out of Port Gardner Bay awakened the rest of the community and led it to nearly unanimous opposition to siting the platform here.
How much that played into the Pentagon’s decision Friday to base the SBX in Adak, Alaska, we may never know. What we do know is that Defense Department officials saw Everett as a desirable site for the SBX, but now they’re going to put it elsewhere.
The $900 million Sea-based Test X-Band Radar platform is part of a national missile defense system designed to shield the United States from attack. The SBX’s job is to track intercontinental ballistic missiles for the 20 minutes or so that they fly outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Its work would take place far out in the Pacific, but it would have been ported in Everett for several months a year, standing eight stories higher than the Lincoln.
The process of siting the SBX was on a fast track — it didn’t even become part of the project until March of last year. Until citizen activists started making their case early this year, few even knew about any plans for the SBX. The first public meeting on the project took place only last October, and in Seattle. Everett had, for all practical purposes, been left out of the process.
Local opponents argued forcefully that the big platform would have undermined the economic development of the waterfront, that it could have interfered with air traffic out of Paine Field, and that too little is known about the potential health effects of low-level radiation, which the SBX would emit while in port. City officials joined the protests and lobbied against the SBX.
Now, appropriately, it will go to a town that wants it rather than one that opposed it. And Everett has the unrelenting work of citizens like Trautman and Anderson to thank.
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