How long are we going to let our local officials allow the Chattanooga Police Firing Range to shoot Chattanooga's growing tourism industry in the foot?
That's what this outdated, poorly sited, city nuisance is doing. Day in and day out, the 33-acre firing range - located just below the perfect park visitor center area and potential public play area to the 768-acre Moccasin Bend park site - eats into Chattanooga and Hamilton County sales tax, hotel tax and additional tourism jobs.
Speak out
Please attend a public meeting on Moccasin Bend park plan Thursday from 4-7 p.m. at Outdoor Chattanooga in Coolidge Park.
Our greater Chattanooga area has a much-touted, $1 billion-a- year tourist economy, and about $66 million of that comes from visitors to the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park - of which Moccasin Bend National Archeological District is a part. Once the Moccasin Bend portion of the park can be opened fully to the public, park officials anticipate it will bring in an additional $15 million a year.
But, as Michael Wurzel, executive director of Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park, pointed out in the Sunday Times Free Press, "startlingly, less than 1 percent" of battlefield visitors now come to Moccasin Bend "because the Bend currently lacks the visitor facilities and experiences that other parts of the park" - such as the Chickamauga Battlefield, Point Park and Signal Point - have already developed.
Why? Well, in large part, because our city and county leaders have progressed only in fits and starts toward relocating the firing range, complaining about cost all the while.
An initial plan to build a $7 million indoor range on 12th Street was abandoned in 2014 because the range did not meet the standards of police, who said they would be better off continuing to use the Moccasin Bend facility, which also houses training for K-9 units and bomb squads, among other functions. Translation: They wanted to be outdoors.
Never mind that an indoor range would allow for shooting practice and certification rain or shine, provide classrooms and eliminate a siting challenge since the sound of gunshots would not disturb existing development.
As for the dogs and bomb squad work, might there not be a space suitable for that on city/county land left on the former 7,700-acre Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant? Enterprise South now sits on 3,000 acres, and 2,800 acres has been dedicated as a public park. By our calculation, that leaves almost 2,000 acres. Surely somewhere in there might be an appropriate space, given that the site used to make TNT.
But in 2015 Chattanooga and Hamilton County leaders balked at building a new range because each government would have to pony up an additional $550,000 each for cleanup of the gunfire lead. Then within months of first the county, then the city backing out, they agreed to spend more than $300,000 for what Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond then called a "short-term solution" new building on that old firing range - the firing range that then was shown to be polluting the Tennessee River with lead runoff.
Meanwhile a committee that now is months behind in its charge to find a solution is looking to find 36-40 acres within 15 minutes of downtown or the police services center, and the price-tag, according to city officials, is looking more like $10 million-$14 million.
In other words, to save a one-time expenditure of maybe now $14 million (and to resist change), we have for years already delayed plans to help Moccasin Bend contribute an additional yearly $15 million to the Chattanooga/Hamilton County economy.
Certainly siting a new firing range is difficult. Certainly finding the dollars for cleanup and land acquisition are difficult. Chattanooga long ago already committed to donating the firing range land, but has balked at paying the cleanup. Meanwhile the National Park Service is prohibited from paying for the land or the cleanup. And groups like the Friends of the Moccasin Bend Park can't be expected to collect millions in donations when the city and county don't seem to be preparing to move off the firing range. So let's give this devil its due: It's complicated.
Chickamauga and Chattanooga Military Park Superintendent Brad Bennett is tactful when he's asked about a completion date for Moccasin Bend, noting that the land management plans used to cover 20 years.
"We no longer even put that kind of date on it," Bennett said. "This is the long-term plan for the national park. We're in the forever business.
Apparently our city and county leaders are, too. They seem to be in the forever business of not looking at how things add up in the big picture. They should remember that they are paid not to throw sand in the gears of a long-awaited 768-acre Moccasin Bend park, but to figure out the complicated landscape of making it happen.