Plans for the Sherwood Police Department to put up an outdoor firing range in a residential area on Trammel Road fell through Thursday after opponents submitted a petition against the proposal, Mayor Virginia Hillman said.
"It's a dead issue as far as I'm concerned," Hillman said of the plan.
The decision came after Hillman met Thursday morning with a potential buyer of an abutting property and others at the site, 834 Trammel Road.
No signs on the 5-acre property indicate that it had been sold or that it was proposed for a gun range or any rezoning. The property, east of U.S. 67/167, is in an R-1 zone, a designation reserved for single-family residences.
There aren't residences behind the property, where target berms would have been placed at about a 25-yard distance for police practice, Hillman said. No houses are immediately to either side.
The Sherwood Police Department bought the property last month for about $18,000 Hillman said. The acreage is just west of the former Roundtop Filling Station, which is being renovated into a police substation. The range would have been off-limits to the public, she added.
"It seemed to be a real good fit," Hillman said, adding that Police Chief Jim Bedwell had previously spoken with neighbors who hadn't objected.
Virginia Jones, who visited with the mayor on-site Thursday, said the city wasn't publicizing the purchase or its plan. Jones is in the process of buying an abutting property, 828 Trammel Road, and heard about the firing-range plans through her real estate agent, she said.
"I'd already had an inspection and am getting my financing in order," Jones said. "I decided that if this was going to happen, I was going to back out of the deal."
As word spread in the past few days, Jones said, area resident Jason Mitchell gathered 30 names on a petition and had submitted it Wednesday to be filed in time for Tuesday's Sherwood City Council meeting, Jones said.
"I didn't even know about the petition," Jones said. "I didn't get to sign it. The people who signed it and me were all concerned about having that in the neighborhood because of the noise and just the drop in real estate values out there as a result."
Hillman said the Police Department has "looked for years" inside the city limits for a gun practice range site. By having to go outside the city for gun practice, she said, officers are "sometimes 30 or 40 minutes away" when needed on a call.
"One of our main needs for our police officers is not having to drive to other cities' agencies for that," Hillman said. "The long-term goal is we would like to have an indoor facility."
Jones said that while she had "a good feeling to know" residents can achieve change when motivated, she remained "cautiously optimistic" about the city's plans going away for good.
"They could do it sneakily," she said. "With things going the way they are, they may pull something out of their hat."
Metro on 05/23/2014