Problems may shoot down park gun club

The rising cost of adhering to tougher environmental regulations may soon force the shutdown of the privately run Chabot Gun Club, which has operated in Anthony Chabot Regional Park for half a century.

A draft report presented by park staff to the East Bay Regional Park District’s Board of Directors last week said the cost of maintaining the shooting range could make it too expensive to renew the club’s lease once it expires on Dec. 31. The park system gets about $40,000 a year from the lease, and the gun club pays an equal amount into a maintenance fund.

But a storm drain requirement that became state law this year could pull the trigger on the shooting range. It would require the club to install filters in the storm drains at a cost of $265,000, with annual maintenance costs of around $10,000. Lead abatement — removing bullets fired into the hillside that leach into groundwater — could cost as much as $1.6 million, with annual cleanups about 10 percent of that cost.

If the gun club can’t pay those bills, the taxpayers would have to.

“If we keep the gun range open, there is going to be a lot of expenses we’ve not had in the past,” said John Sutter, a

park board member. “Capital costs, increased lead abatement, noise (reduction), maintaining infrastructure — and an environmental impact report. When you add it all up, our expenses would exceed $3 million — and that’s a median price.”

Sutter said it’s too expensive for a single program — and that park officials have shut down popular recreational activities in the past when they have become too costly to maintain.

The park district has canceled a motocross hill-climb competition in Chabot Park, closed the water slide at Shadow Cliffs Regional Recreation Area in Pleasanton, and put the wildly popular children’s pony rides at Berkeley’s Tilden Park back in the barn after manure was found in the watershed.

Plus, the gun club has lost money over the past three years, though it attracts about 44,000 people a year. That may sound like a lot, but it’s less than half of 1 percent of the nearly 20 million people who visit the huge park system’s 120,000 acres.

If those aren’t enough reasons to give the board cause for pause when it ponders the future of the gun range at its meeting on Oct. 20, there is the larger question about the appropriateness of letting a gun range operate in a public park at all.

Hikers and neighbors have long complained about the noise from pistols, rifles and shotguns — and the park is required to have a buffer zone around the range to ensure the safety of others using nearby park facilities.

One long-term idea the district is exploring if the gun range were to close is to extend the boundaries of the Chabot campgrounds, which sit adjacent to the gun range. But cleanup costs — which would be required before the land could be repurposed — could be $4 million, Sutter said.

A decision on the gun range’s future could be made as early as next month, when the final report is submitted to the seven-member Board of Directors.

Former park ranger and longtime environmental activist Peter Volin, who raised the issue of the gun club last year, said that, in essence, the gun club has become obsolete in its current location.

“I guess the bottom line is they put it in the wrong place 51 years ago,” Volin said Monday. “No one anticipated all the problems with the lead.” He called the range a holdover from an earlier era, when “people smoked in hospital rooms and no one wore a seat belt.”

As much as I enjoyed the day I spent at the Chabot Gun Club in February 2014, I know the gun range no longer fits with the district’s mission to taxpayers. Even gun enthusiasts should see that its impact on park environs, neighborhoods and park users mean the gun club has become more of a liability than an asset.