Town Meeting

In letters signed by more than 40 local religious leaders, local spiritual leaders of a variety of traditions appealed to Vermont’s Congressional delegation and the mayors of Winooski and Burlington, to reconsider the plan to base the F-35 fighter-bomber at Burlington ‘s airport.

“Now that this matter is going to be adjudicated in a court of law, we urge you to reconsider your support for what is a highly questionable endangerment of Vermonters and the imposition of financial hardship on the most economically and socially vulnerable of our neighbors living in the flight path of these yet to be fully tested fighter-bombers.”

The religious leaders called for “transparent, public discussion.” They wrote, “The need for civil public debate about these issues only has grown over the past few years. Enclosed with the letters was information about the safety of the planes. “It is mathematically impossible for the F-35s to have flown enough by 2020 to have established a confident safety record. Both the planes and the pilots are spending less time in the air,” they wrote, “because it has been grounded for safety reasons more than a dozen times.”

Religious leaders are speaking up once again, as they had a few years back, both because of continuing safety concerns and because a lawsuit filed against the Air Force, is to be heard by a Federal judge in Vermont this coming spring or summer. The lawsuit alleges that the Air Force failed to fulfill requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act.