Shooting range takes hit

A proposed $3.6 million expansion of the shooting range in Farragut State Park can’t proceed as planned and existing use of the range must stop until safety improvements are made, a judge has ruled.

Friday’s order by 1st District Judge John Mitchell requires the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to install overhead baffles at each of the range’s 10 existing firing lanes, to keep bullets from passing over bullet-stopping berms behind targets.

Even when the baffles are installed, Mitchell added, no more than 500 shooters may use the range each year. Fish and Game must close the range for the year when the 500th shooter fires his final shot.

The department’s expansion plan provides for 130 shooting stations in simultaneous use and up to 557,112 users per year – which would be 471 times the 1,181 users in 2005 or more than 3,000 times the 182 who signed a log in 2002, Mitchell pointed out.

He arrived at a limit of 500 as an “acceptable” increase from what he said might have been 250 users in 2002 if some shooters didn’t sign the log.

Mitchell determined that construction of an improved access road in 2003 – eliminating a half-mile hike to the range – turned the decades-old firing range into a nuisance for nearby residents.

As things stand, Mitchell said, the range near Bayview, Idaho, doesn’t satisfy the Kootenai County zoning requirement that it be designed and located “with full consideration to the safety factors involved in such a use.” He cited testimony from occupants of some of the 18 to 20 homes within 1,000 feet of the target end of the range.

Will Collins and his next-door neighbor, Dorothy Eldridge, testified in last December’s bench trial that bullets flew over their heads or struck objects on their property.

Mitchell found the residents’ testimony credible, but not the testimony of Fish and Game biologist David Leptich that use of the range hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change even after the proposed expansion.

Leptich was “wearing blinders” when he dismissed his own safety expert’s standards for “populated areas” as applying only to “highly populated areas,” Mitchell stated.

State law protects gun ranges from nuisance complaints by neighbors who move in after the range opens, but not if there is a “substantial change” in use of the range.

Easier access in 2003 created such a change, Mitchell ruled, declining to dismiss the lawsuit filed by shooting-range neighbors and others in a group called Citizens Against Range Expansion.

Some of the critics had hoped to remove the 160-acre firing range from the 4,000-acre state park, or at least to stop the Department of Fish and Game from raising money to expand the range, but Mitchell rejected that as well.

Fish and Game may raise as much money it wishes and make as many improvements as it wants, but Mitchell said the 500-user cap will remain in place until noise problems are abated and additional safety steps are taken.

The judge didn’t say what it would take to solve the noise problem. But he said safety problems caused by more than 500 users a year would require additional bullet baffles, “so that a round cannot escape” the range.

The baffles required just to reopen the range would be limited to stopping bullets that are aimed too high – with a barrier of wood, concrete or some other material suspended over the firing lane in front of the shooter.

Expansion would require enough baffles to ensure “no blue sky” on the firing range, Mitchell said.

With that kind of bullet baffling and adequate noise abatement, the shooting range may expand and still operate without the supervision of a range master, the judge ruled.