Residents in Pittsburgh’s Highland Park neighborhood are urging city officials to immediately close its police firing range off Washington Boulevard. The outdoor gun range has been used by city law enforcement as a training facility since the 1980s.
Members of the Highland Park Community Council say in that time, it’s continued to create a disturbance and public health risk in the neighborhood, despite multiple proposals from elected officials to close it.
“It should not be surprising to anyone that the sound of gunfire ringing through the park and on our streets and in our homes is not just a nuisance, but it triggers anxiety in both adults and children,” HPCC President Stephanie Walsh said Tuesday. “People are tired of the gunfire and they're tired of the broken promises from the city.”
Walsh and others with the HPCC met with Lisa Frank, the city's chief operating and administrative officer, to discuss future plans for the range last week.
Maria Montaño, spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Gainey’s office, said the administration is “firmly committed” to funding the design of a new facility in its 2024 budget, though there is no short-term fix to the problem.
“This is a problem that has existed for nearly 40 years, and one that does not have an immediate short-term solution,” Montaño wrote in a statement. “The design and build out of a new facility will take time and until that is completed, we still have to make sure that our officers are trained to the best of their ability so they can help keep our city safe.”
Nearly 1,200 people have signed a petition calling on the city to close the gun range. Its author, Joy Katz, also brought up concerns about the environmental costs of such an outdoor facility.
Most pistol bullets are made of a lead alloy and encased in metal. Lead particles are often released as the bullet soars down the barrel of the gun, leaving potentially toxic dust behind.
“That firing range, as far as we know, hasn't had any kind of lead remediation since 2018,” Katz said. “Over a million rounds of weapons have been fired since then.”
Back in 2021, former Mayor Bill Peduto announced plans to create a state-of-the-art public safety training facility in nearby Lincoln-Lemington that would include an indoor gun range.
City officials purchased the old Veterans Affairs hospital campus on Highland Drive for $1 earlier that year with the intention of building the facility there. The latest budget, however, pushed back funding for the previous administration’s plan, with $1.4 million in funds allocated to the project the prior year left unspent.
According to the capital budget passed in December, a public safety training center in Lincoln-Lemington — though not explicitly labeled as the VA campus — is slated to receive $5 million in 2025, with an additional $12 million projected in 2026.
But City Council member Deb Gross, who represents Highland Park, said such a large project isn’t necessarily the best way to solve the neighborhood’s gunfire problems.
The VA campus spans 165 acres, according to a resolution approving its purchase. “And we don't need 200 acres to have an indoor firing range,” Gross said. “You need a couple hundred thousand square feet, possibly.”
Gross said a stand-alone indoor firing range would cost the city much less, and limit law enforcement’s footprint in the area. She compared Peduto’s plan to the proposed training facility at the center of protests in Atlanta, nicknamed “Cop City.”
“There's no reason to hold up [plans for] an indoor firing range, or even a combined public safety training facility, at a smaller scale,” Gross continued, “rather than have a kind of mock city on a 200-acre site.”
As to where a new firing range would be situated, Walsh said the HPCC has little preference, as long as the sound of the gunshots is reduced.
While city officials say police are scheduled to train at other facilities in the region whenever possible, a schedule obtained by the HPCC showed training sessions were held on more than half of all days in March.
With each practice lasting 2-3 hours, Walsh said days with multiple sessions mean blasts are heard throughout Highland Park all day. Additional days are often scheduled without prior notice, sometimes over holidays and weekends.
“We urge the mayor to recognize that being exposed to gunfire on a daily basis is not normal — that it is a public health concern — and to find money in the current budget to begin a transparent planning process immediately for closing the firing range as soon as possible,” she added.
