Among the rampant rumors ricocheting around Denver’s outdoor community concerning construction of a large-scale shooting park, certain facts have emerged.
Colorado Division of Wildlife facilitators are close to a deal for a site adjacent to the north metro area. Details on location and price are being withheld while price-sensitive negotiations are underway.
The $800,000 grant provided in July 2005 by Great Outdoors Colorado is not in jeopardy while the site search continues.
“This was a three-year funding, and we’re just halfway through that cycle,” Scott Hoover, DOW’s Northeast Region director, said, squelching the blab that the GoCo appropriation of vital money is about to expire.
“The greater urgency is that land is disappearing quickly to development,” Hoover said. “We’ve been working on this for two years. It’s an extremely frustrating process.”
Hoover explained that the GoCo grant is intended as seed money to launch the project.
“We’ve spent little of that money. Until we actually get a site, we don’t know how much construction will cost.”
Expect the final tab for a complex that will include a long-distance rifle range, a pistol range, an indoor range and facilities for trap, skeet and sporting clays to run toward many millions. Ideally, such a compound would require a half-section of land, perhaps more.
“A lot of things are beyond our grasp until we get a site under contract,” Hoover said. “We don’t know how much it will cost to get utilities in and move dirt.”
The key consideration, Hoover said, is location. A survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation revealed that participants are willing to travel 45 minutes to an hour. The obvious challenge lies in finding a large block of land inside this perimeter, considering the rapid expansion of housing development.
Since the region’s largest existing public shooting facility, at Cherry Creek State Park, generally serves the south metro area, the search is concentrated north of town to provide greatest opportunity for the most people. Trouble is, that’s also a hotbed of real estate subdivision.
“We’ve evaluated six or seven sites. The big problem is money. Land in the metro area is expensive,” Hoover said of a search that originally centered on the old Lowry Bombing Range. That location evaporated in a recent real estate deal.
When planning a shooting center, complications abound.
“It’s not just the footprint of the range, but you need a buffer so houses don’t close in and shut you down,” Hoover said.
This is a syndrome that has nettled shooting enthusiasts for decades. In a pattern as precise as a repeating rifle, ranges either have been forced to close or keep moving in a hop-scotch fashion amid housing developments.
Currently, only three significant public ranges exist in eastern Colorado: Cherry Creek, the Pawnee Shooting Center near Briggsdale and the newer Lead Valley Shooting Center east of Byers. Shooters can buy time at certain private ranges, but the situation deepens with recent developments on public lands.
The U.S. Forest Service is conducting a study to determine whether it will close about 200,000 acres of the Arapaho- Roosevelt National Forest west of Boulder to shooting, again because of conflict with creeping urbanization.
Against this backdrop, the pressure builds for DOW to move its project forward.
“We’re working as quickly as we can,” said Jim Goodyear, the agency’s special projects manager. “We’re working on a promising site, and right now things are looking pretty good.”
As for a timetable, don’t expect to fire a shot for at least three years from the date a property finally is acquired, a best-case scenario provided adequate funding is obtained.
That’s just another fact of shooting life in the big city.
