New $67 Million DPW Facility Prompts Hunting Association To Walk Away From Shooting Range

The town unveiled plans last week for a new $67.7 million Department of Public Works (DPW) headquarters on Shadbush Road, east of Nantucket Memorial Airport. But its pursuit of the new facility prompted the Nantucket Hunting Association to walk away from its two-decade-long goal of building a shooting range on the same property. 

After DPW director Drew Patnode presented the preliminary plans for the 63,000-square-foot building, members of the Nantucket Hunting Association revealed that they had been in negotiations with the Select Board since April on a memorandum of understanding to share the undeveloped, 27-acre municipal property. But those talks fell apart in recent weeks due to state requirements for land mitigation due to the presence of an endangered moth and the Select Board's inability to give the Hunting Association a firm timeline for when it could move forward with its long-awaited shooting range. 

"The dealbreaker for us was the agreement," said Nantucket Hunting Association president Steven Holdgate. "It seemed there would be no guarantee we could enter into a lease or break ground on a project. There were too many unknowns. We had to get behind and support (the new DPW) project in the beginning through the town meetings in 2025 and into 2027. But if the DPW project didn't happen, if it didn't get approval, we would not get our shooting range project." 

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 hunting association, the proposal had been met with numerous roadblocks, including lawsuits and protracted negotiations with local and state permitting agencies. 

The town began eyeing the Shadbush Road property in 2017 as an ideal spot to relocate the existing DPW headquarters on Madaket Road, which Patnode described as an "unsafe and unhealthy work environment" that would likely be subject to flooding in the coming decades due to sea level rise. Despite Town Meeting voters rejecting a $1.2 million appropriation for the design of a new facility at Shadbush Road during the Annual Town Meeting in May, the plans have proceeded nonetheless. 

Patnode and a representative from the architectural and design firm Weston & Sampson presented those plans to the Select Board last Wednesday and described the complex considerations of utilizing the Shadbush Road property. The project would relocate the DPW's headquarters and staff, but not the municipal landfill operation, which will remain on Madaket Road. 

While the undeveloped, industrial-zoned site on Shadbush Road encompasses 27 acres, only about one-third of it can be developed due to mitigation requirements imposed by the state's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program. The remaining two-thirds would have to be placed under a conservation restriction that would prohibit further development. 

Under the plan the town was negotiating with the Nantucket Hunting Association, the group would have received a 1.1-acre parcel adjacent to the new DPW facility to build the shooting range. The memorandum of understanding would have required the hunting association to support the town's plans for the new DPW facility, and the shooting range project would only have been allowed to proceed if voters endorsed the $67 million project at future Town Meetings. But without assurances as to when it could break ground, and the potential for it to be tied up if the DPW project failed, led the hunting association to walk away.

"I'm sorry, but we have a had a lot of bad luck with delays and the rug being pulled out from underneath us, so we have a distrust," Holdgate said. "Waiting another three to five years with putting our support behind everything and trying to raise funds for a shooting range that may never happen, and if the DPW takes a little delay, what's to stop there from being another priority for the town and then there's no shooting range at all?"

Select Board chair Brooke Mohr expressed her disappointment that the talks with the hunting association broke down, but also that she was perplexed by its decision to walk away after all these years.

"We cannot offer certainty, and that's where things came to a dead end," Mohr said. "Not accepting that reality closed the door for you guys in a way that was very unfortunate. We could not provide you the certainty that you wanted. The end result here is that the opportunity is gone. That doesn't make sense to me from your point of view. I was frankly really surprised after all the time we spent trying to make this work that that was the outcome. But this board and the community cannot encumber the property in a way that allows you to go forward without knowing what we're doing. This is an incredibly valuable parcel of land that we need for really critical municipal purposes. I'm truly disappointed this didn't end up in a place we could work together. I lobbied really hard for you guys."

To read more about the town's plans for a new DPW headquarters, click here.