Shooting range in DNR sights

Does the metro area have 530 acres for a $22 million mega-sized shooting complex? The state Department of Natural Resources is about to find out.

The DNR has invited metro cities, counties, townships and park boards to offer possible sites by Sept. 7 for what would be the state's largest complex offering indoor and outdoor sport shooting.

The purpose is to encourage more people to hunt and engage in shooting sports, said Dave Schad, the DNR's fish and wildlife director. Such a complex also would be likely to host national competitions.

"The need for additional shooting sports opportunities is pretty evident in the state. We were asked by the state Legislature to take a look at this," Schad said.

Outdoors, patrons would have a choice of 10 skeet fields, 30 traps fields, a 15-station rifle range, an archery range with more than 22 stations and a five-station pistol range. Indoor firearm and archery ranges are planned, as well.

The complex also would have a 90-acre campground that could accommodate 232 motor homes.

Rep. David Dill, DFL-Crane Lake, who authored the site search legislation, said he feels it's important to keep connected to the outdoors.

"Our youth hunter recruitment continues to suffer. It's not just Minnesota; it's all states," he said. "We are trying to bring people into hunting and into shooting sports. You can't expect people to continue to participate when there isn't opportunity."

But Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, who chairs the House capital investment committee, said she was surprised -- and unhappy -- to learn of the site search.

Looking through old spending bills, she found $300,000 tucked into a 2009 budget-balancing bill to solicit interest in the complex.

"We were cutting everything in that bill and what we gave cash to was a shooting range?" Hausman said. "It's something a segment in our Legislature gets away with all the time. There is this kind of privileged group of sportsmen who get money when nobody else does."

There hasn't yet been discussion about how to pay for the complex. For now, supporters want to see if a site can be found.

A way of life

Chuck Niska, the state's shooting range coordinator, said that while some might see a shooting complex as serving an exclusive sporting niche, such a complex would be an ideal place to introduce young people to hunting sports and teach them safe gun handling.

"If we don't get them involved with this, they never likely will get involved in it," Niska said. "Hunting and shooting as part of the American way of life is going to go away."

Minnesota has about 575,000 hunters, the DNR figures. That's about 13 percent of the population, down from a steady 16 percent participation rate from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, according to an October 2009 DNR report on fishing and hunting trends.

The highest percentage of state hunters live in northwestern Minnesota, where 26 percent of the population hunted in 2008. In the metro area, hunters made up only 6.9 percent of the population.

Hunters are important to the state because they control the deer population, said Jay Johnson, hunter recruitment and retention officer. Hunting license fees pay for land and wildlife conservation, he added.

The Minnesota Trap Shooting Association, with more than 1,000 members, is enthusiastic about a large metro shooting complex.

"We want people to come out," association president Glen Lonneman said. "It's like building a new stadium. It's new. It's nice. So everybody goes."

'Gold standard facility'

The state already has a $2.5 million indoor shooting range: the Minnesota Shooting Sports and Education Center in Grand Rapids. It opened in January 2000 and had been envisioned as a world-class center for training and competition. But it has been closed for the past year and a half, and now the DNR is considering turning it into office space.

"We never got the use and participation in events that allowed us to generate enough revenue to make it a viable facility," Schad said. "The idea behind the shooting center in Grand Rapids is a good one. It's just too far away."

A metro shooting complex, on the other hand, would succeed because it would be close to most of the state's population, Schad said. It also would have enough room for different kinds of shooting events, making it attractive for large national competitions.

"These facilities, for obvious reasons, can be controversial," he said. "There has been a lot of advancement in how to build them safely and deal with things like noise."

Three Rivers Park District board members entertained the idea of making land available but declined, saying they wouldn't devote 530 acres of park land for that purpose.

With the allocated money, an interested local government could do some initial planning to decide whether to pursue it, Schad said. "We would work with them to secure the necessary approvals and funding to develop it," he said.

A 530-acre complex would be a "gold standard facility," Schad said. If communities were interested in a smaller center, he said, the DNR could work with them to identify what was most important.

Dill said many states are building large, multi-discipline shooting centers as an economic draw. A shooting range in Sparta, Ill., was built by the state at a reclaimed strip mine and drew thousands of youths for a national competition recently, he said.

"It's the [DNR's] job to go out now and look for a site and see which communities might be interested in participating in something like this," Dill said.

Laurie Blake • 612-673-1711