(2006-12-20) Members of the National Capital Skeet and Trap Club (NCST) are slowly giving up hope of hearing positive news from the Ehrlich administration, as time slips away in the battle to reopen their Montgomery County facility.
Three years ago NCST was sued by the Kennedy front group called River Keepers, over claims that lead in the shot-fall area was polluting an adjacent creek. The state, in the form of DNR, was a co-defendant because it owns the property (the result of an eminent domain action decades ago.) Over time, all but one count was thrown out by the federal court, and the suit’s last count went to arbitration. This apparently concluded successfully earlier this year.
NCST has been closed to shooting all this time, not because of the court but because of DNR. The court’s interest in the matter is limited to ensuring lead doesn’t drop into the water. Club members have long had a proposal submitted to DNR to allow them to simply reorient their fields and shoot in the other direction. DNR has denied this request.
Ehrlich administration officials involved in the case privately (and correctly) acknowledge that the core of this case is not lead in the water but the club’s existence. With property values at sky-high levels, million-dollar McMansions now surround the parkland, and the perception is that many of these landowners simply don’t like guns. As a result, neighbors brought suit not because they care so much about lead, but because it was a convenient avenue for attack.
The problem now is that instead of defending the park’s tenant of many decades, the state is using the suit as excuse to cease all operations in deference to influential neighbors. Some observers believe that the state’s strategic goal all along has been to close the ranges on a ‘temporary’ pretext (the lead issue), then drag out legal proceedings long enough for the ranges to lose grandfathering status under state range protection rules concerning noise. It would be prohibitively expensive for NCST to resume operations under the newer noise restrictions. (That’s right: the Ehrlich administration would be complicit in the closing of yet another shooting facility. Some legacy!)
As time after the arbitration dragged on this fall, NCST sought help from the administration, but were told “call us on November 8th” (the day after the election.) But since then the bureaucracy spigot has turned on full, and nobody will say who can issue an approval. The NCST situation post-election was an opportunity for the administration to show its true colors. It did. Even freed from the pressures of an election, it won’t do the right thing: renew NCST’s lease to ground the club once owned and grant permission for members to operate their range, as they should have been able to do all along. Time is running out on the future of yet another top shotgun facility in the state.