Federal officials were absent when members of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative met Thursday at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for an update from the military and the Environmental Protection Agency on ongoing efforts to close the Red Hill fuel storage facility and water testing on the Navy waterline.

The fourth meeting of the group had been scheduled well in advance.

But as the group members sat on one side of the table, the reserved seats for the officials on the other side of the table were empty.

Members of the group had expected that. On Monday they received an email from Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Installations, Energy and Facilities Robert Thompson informing them they wouldn’t attend.

“As you know, the meeting in December did not go well, and so we will defer the meeting in January on the 18th that you have requested and will look forward to our next CRI meeting in February,” Thompson wrote. “In order to have more effective meetings, we are evaluating the structure of the CRI and will work with you to establish operating procedures and ground rules that will promote civil discussion and the effective exchange of information.”

The Red Hill facility sits just 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water. In 2014 a spill at the facility led to a federal consent decree in which the Navy agreed to overhaul the aging World War II-era facility.

Navy officials insisted the facility was safe and critical to national security. But in November 2021 fuel from the Red Hill facility contaminated the Navy’s waterline, which serves 93,000 people, including service members, military families and civilians living in former military housing areas.

In March 2022 the Pentagon announced it would defuel and permanently shut down the facility. The CRI was formed as part of a new federal consent decree the Navy signed with the EPA and the state of Hawaii. It’s an elected board of community representatives to provide oversight.

“I didn’t think that the conversation that happened in December crossed any lines,” said Marti Townsend, a prominent local environmental activist who sits on the CRI. “They — the federal representatives and the Navy representatives — were not being helpful, and people were frustrated — rightfully so. And then the meeting carried on, we moved on.”

In a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the Navy said that it “has not stopped participating in the CRI and remains fully committed to meeting the intent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2023 consent order regarding the Community Representation Initiative (CRI). Unfortunately, recent CRI actions have taken this initiative off course and driven the need for a reset in January.”

“Who do they want to improve it for? Because I think given what we have, we’re doing a pretty good job for the public,” said Lacey Quintero, a military spouse and veteran sickened by contamination at Red Hill who sits on the CRI. “They’re welcome to come to us every week and tell us how we can do better. But I think what they really mean is improve it, improve operations, make them look better, and that’s just not our job. That’s not why we’re here.”

David Kimo Frankel, an attorney representing the Sierra Club on the CRI, charged that military officials are avoiding them because they haven’t gotten their way and want to change the rules.

“The Navy does not have the legal authority to restructure the CRI, but it would like to because it is unable to control us,” Frankel said. “It has proposed a series of apparently private meetings with us to discuss before the February meeting. But at least some of us are not interested or willing to do that.”

The group discussed options for engaging the Navy at its weekly internal meeting, which is viewable to the public online via Zoom.

“We decided to hold firm to our expectation that CRI meetings be public because transparency is a key element in building trust — and if they want to have our trust, they have to be transparent,” Townsend said. “The CRI was the single demand that got the most public comments on proposed enforcement action that the EPA imposed on the Navy, like that was the one thing that the public wanted. It’s the one thing that’s different from the enforcement action on the 2014 leak.”