YORK — At the end of Cox Drive, near a dump transfer station, are 70-foot-tall berms for a future York-Poquoson Sheriff’s Office shooting range.
The sheriff’s office is a year and a half to two years away from having the $1.6 million, outdoor handgun and rifle range for its deputies, said York-Poquoson Sheriff J.D. “Danny” Diggs.
“People expect us to make life-and-death decisions and we want to be as well prepared as possible,” Diggs said. “When we go to the range it’s not just target practice, it’s use-of-force practice.”
About 100 York-Poquoson deputies get their annual four- to eight-hour firearms training in a classroom, at the Lafayette Gun Club in Grafton or at another police department’s shooting range. Deputies in the tactical team get a lot more training because they are in a higher risk category, Diggs said.
They spend work hours driving as far as New Kent County and Hampton to find range time, and then are not always able to conduct tactical training. Deputies are expected to learn how to pull a handgun from a holster and fire, take cover behind a car and fire again. At Lafayette Gun Club they can shoot for free but don’t have opportunities for tactical shooting. They must play by club rules, which include keeping an uncased or unholstered firearm with its muzzle pointed toward the backstop of a gun range on the firing line, said Lafayette Gun Club president Donald Streater.
“It becomes a logistical nightmare,” Diggs said. “If we had a range, deputies would have a place to practice more or less on their own, with supervision. It would be available and we would more likely train more often if we had our own place.”
The sheriff’s office has been working on building a shooting range for eight years and asked that the $1.6 million project be added to the county’s capital improvements program several years in a row. It never got funded.
“While it is important to the sheriff’s office, we have other funding issues that we have to deal with,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas Shepperd. “We know we have alternative methods of training our officers so we will be very cautious on funding.”
Diggs said he hopes to find a way to build the shooting range with zero cost to the county. The county gave the sheriff’s office permission to use the land, which is York County Waste Management Center property. The site plan for the range was approved through an administrative review in February 2014 after the county administrator consulted with the Board of Supervisors, county spokeswoman Gail Whittaker wrote in an email. No board vote was needed, she said.
Highway construction company E.V. Williams donated the 70-foot mounds of dirt for the berms, Diggs said. Diggs said he hopes to fund the rest of the project with drug asset forfeiture money and donations from other law enforcement agencies.
The shooting range will be modeled after the Hampton Police Department’s outdoor shooting range off of Bethel Avenue, Diggs said. It will be used primarily during the day but they will have night training as well, Diggs said. The range will have 10 rifle lanes and 25 handgun lanes. The deputies would practice with weapons 9 mm handguns, .40-caliber handguns, .223-caliber assault rifles and .308-caliber sniper rifles, Diggs said.
The plan is for officers to shoot east at targets in front of berms in the direction of the dump and open land with power lines overhead. Concrete recycling company S.B. Cox Inc., is north of the future shooting range, a commercial and residential area is west of it and a residential area is south of it.
Residents south of the range on the other side of Goodwin Neck Road said they were surprised to hear a shooting range was being built but overall didn’t mind if it was the sheriff’s office building one.
“If it’s a hunt club or any kind of club then, no,” said Doris Pierro who lives on Rosewood Lane about a third of a mile from the future shooting range. If it is the sheriff’s office, “I am sure they will be responsible. I hope.”
Lysia Bliss, who also lives on Rosewood Lane, said she is comfortable with the sound of firearms because her husband served in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years. Lee Roberts, who lives on Bell Hill Drive, said he wasn’t sure whether he would even be able to hear the gunfire.
The sheriff’s office said it is building berms that are 70 feet tall and 57 feet wide so that they will act as both a safety barrier and a noise barrier. The sheriff also plans to build a fence or plant trees at the top of the berms so that there is an additional sound barrier and something that might catch a stray bullet.
“In the planning of this, public safety was paramount and the public not being disturbed was secondary,” said York-Poquoson Lt. Dennis Ivey.
Paul Kelly, who lives on Sleepy Hollow Lane, said he isn’t crazy about the idea, because there is already so much activity in that area. “It’s still a dump,” Kelly said. “It’s just one more thing over there.”
Somers can be reached by phone at 757-298-5176.
