ARVADA — When Brett Vernon moved into a brand-new house in Leyden Rock at the end of 2014, he came for the breathtaking vistas of the Jefferson County foothills, the fresh air and the quiet.
The quiet is being swallowed slowly by hundreds of homes going up in northwest Arvada, but it’s an ambient noise of neighborhood living that Vernon can handle. What is less manageable is the potential for continuous rounds being fired at a proposed 30-lane shooting range less than a mile from his single-family home.
“I wouldn’t have bought here if I knew this was going in,” Vernon said. “This just isn’t the place for it.”
Hundreds of residents — many sure to raise objections about noise, peace of mind and property values — are expected to turn out for an open house on the matter at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Ralston Valley High School.
At first glance, the Blunn/Pioneer area just east of Colorado 93 and south of Leyden Road looks like the perfect spot for a shooting facility — hundreds of windswept acres of open land interrupted by little more than the highway connecting Boulder and Golden. It’s a big part of the reason .
But in just the past few years, — in the Leyden Rock, Candelas and Spring Mesa neighborhoods — and thousands more are on tap.
Mark Merline moved into his home in Leyden Rock less than a year ago. He said shooting ranges have the potential effect of depressing home values in surrounding neighborhoods.
“There’s been no real estate study by (Jefferson County) to see if this will have an impact on us,” said Merline, an environmental consultant. “The whole thing is getting pushed through awfully hard.”
One key figure that Merline, Vernon and others cite is a distance buffer Arvada identified for proximity of homes to the range — a minimum distance of 1.3 miles to “the nearest subdivision” is listed in the city’s 2015 Blunn/Pioneer master plan. Hundreds of houses in Leyden Rock — especially future lots on the west side of the development — are within a mile of the proposed shooting range.
Jefferson County, which would own the facility but build it as part of a public-private partnership, . The data show distance from the range would serve as the most effective sound damper, with most homes falling well outside the buffer at which background noise absorbs any sounds from the shooting range.
Jefferson County Open Space and Parks director Tom Hoby said he understands neighbors’ concerns. And those concerns, he said, will be directly addressed before any plans are put into place.
“The heart of the matter is the noise level and can it be mitigated for the people who live around this site so that it doesn’t impact their lifestyles,” he said. “We don’t want to build a facility that down the road we’re going to get constant complaints about from our neighbors.”
Hoby said steps can be taken to dramatically lessen the noise impacts of a shooting range, including using a shoot house to dampen the sound coming from the gun’s muzzle, building berms to absorb the sound waves and installing a baffling system to direct gunshot noise downward.
The county was asked to look into building a shooting range a few years ago because people have been using nearby forest land to practice their marksmanship, a situation that has resulted in lead contamination from spent ammunition and potential danger of errant shots to campers and hikers nearby.
Hoby said that although neighbor concerns about a shooting range are very important, the county is feeling pressure from those who feel there are not enough places to shoot around the metro area.
“On the other side of this issue are people saying, ‘When are you going to get this done, Jefferson County?’ ” he said. “We are very motivated to make sure these noise levels can be mitigated.”
