Hunting Association Signs Agreement With Town To Pave Way For Shooting Range
Jason Graziadei •
After walking away from a deal with the Select Board last month for its long-sought shooting range, the Nantucket Hunting Association has reversed course and signed an agreement with the town that lays out a path for the range to be built on a 1-acre parcel of public land east of Nantucket Memorial Airport.
The deal was announced Wednesday night by Select Board chair Brooke Mohr, who said she was "beyond delighted" the agreement had been signed.
The construction of the shooting range, however, will be directly tied to the town's pursuit of the proposed $67 million headquarters for the Department of Public Works (DPW) on the same municipal property at 1 Shadbush Road. According to the terms of the memorandum of understanding between the Select Board and the Nantucket Hunting Association (NHA), a final ground lease for the shooting range will only be granted if the town can secure favorable votes for the design and construction of the new DPW facility no later than 2027. The agreement also requires the NHA to support the DPW project at future town meetings.
If the two projects navigate permitting and the town can secure the necessary votes for funding, the NHA will finally be able to move forward with plans for an indoor shooting range that would include a 2,160-square-foot main building, a below-grade 50-yard rifle/pistol range, and an area for a future 100-yard below-grade range. The lease area and size of the range are far smaller than what was originally envisioned when the NHA initially pursued the project more than 20 years ago.
"I just want to acknowledge it is a big change from the original plan the Hunting Association had," Mohr said on Wednesday. "But this has been years and years in the making, and circumstances change in town government and needs change, and I'm very hopeful that this will meet both the needs of the community for a DPW facility and provide a facility for gun owners to safely shoot and do target practice and so forth."
Steven Holdgate, the president of the NHA, did not return messages seeking comment.
Both the shooting range and the new DPW facility will be situated on the town's 27-acre property at 1 Shadbush Road. Due to the presence of endangered species on the site, the property is subject to the state's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program and Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act permitting process. That includes a 2 to 1 mitigation requirement, necessitating that 18 of the 27 acres will be reserved as open space under a conservation restriction. The town will seek to build the new DPW headquarters on 7.9 acres, leaving the NHA with 1.1 acres. The agreement binds the town and the NHA to undertake "joint permitting" of the two projects and stipulates that the "NHA agrees to cooperate and support the Town regarding any appropriations for 2025 Annual and Special Town Meeting approvals and funding sought" for the DPW headquarters project.
"The last meeting where this was on our agenda, the Hunting Association came and had indicated that they were not going to sign the memorandum of understanding," Mohr said on Wednesday. "And they left that meeting and returned to the board and turned in a signed copy of the MOU, and the board authorized me to talk with the Hunting Association because we were curious about how they went from a no to a yes. What was it? Was it, you know, an official process within their organization? We just had some questions about the process. The NHA did do a survey of its members to gauge levels of support, and they felt, from the results of that, that they did have the support of an adequate percentage of the membership to support their change and their decision to sign, and so therefore, the Select Board has accepted their execution of the MOU and we have signed it.'
For more than 20 years, the Nantucket Hunting Association has been pursuing a shooting range. Despite several Town Meeting votes in favor of the proposal and granting a lease for municipally-owned property to the association, the proposal had been met with numerous roadblocks, including lawsuits from neighbors on Wigwam Road and protracted negotiations with local and state permitting agencies.
"I think this is a win, win, win," Select Board member Matt Fee said on Wednesday. "It's a win for the Hunting Association. It's a win for the town. I think it's also a win for that neighborhood because this is not quite exactly what they would like, but this is kind of what they were willing to accept 10 or 15 years ago. So I have a feeling that this, that all parties here should be pretty happy about this, and it's a good thing."