Hunting association under fire for shooting range proposal
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Since the 1970s, gun-owning Nantucketers have gone target shooting on 48 acres of townowned land between Bunker Road and Russell's Way with little or no consequence.

But now, with around 30 homes inhabiting the u-shaped Wigwam Road on the east side of Russell's Way, the prospect of the discharging of rifles and shotguns within a third of a mile from a residential area - despite there being only one noise complaint from the area in the last three years - has residents up in arms over the potential danger and noise pollution of the Nantucket Hunting Association's proposed shooting range.

The hunting association, is pursuing a special permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals to establish a recreational use in the Land- Use-General-Three zone where the town lot is located. The Nantucket Hunting Association wants to set up specific shooting areas for archery, skeet and pistol, and rifle target practice with three sheds, a threesided shelter, a small bathroom building and a sand/gravel parking area.

Although residents in the area have been wary of the shooting range for years, their vigilance intensified when the hunting associ- ation signed a lease with the town on Dec. 11, 2006 for the use of the property.

And with the hunting association's filing last spring for a Board of Appeals special permit to formalize their use of the northern portion of the property as a shooting range, the opportunity for the neighborhood Wigwam Association to silence or at least curtail the shooting range, arrived.

In Dec. 5 letters to the ZBA, island attorney Kevin Dale, who represents the Russell's Way/Wigwam Road Maintenance Trust, provided the board with a noise study done by Cavanaugh Tocci Associates, Inc. of Sudbury, Mass., stating that the shooting range's noise levels measured in decibels would exceed the town's limit of 63 decibels as well as the state's Department of Environmental Protection's maximum level of 50 to 55 decibels 2,500 feet from the Wigwam Road residential area.

Dale also cited other concerns from his clients in one of his letters.

"Permitting a shooting range in a rural and relatively undeveloped residential area is not in harmony with the intent and purpose of the Nantucket Zoning By-Law," Dale noted in his letter to the ZBA on behalf of Michael and Marisol Cohen of 33 and 35 Wigwam Road, the closest residents to the shooting range. "The noise and disruption produced by the proposed shooting range will be substantially more detrimental to the Wigwam Road neighborhood than the existing use of this undeveloped and vacant Town property. Any prior use of this Town property for a shooting range was impermissible and illegal, and it establishes no precedent for the proposed range."

For the Nantucket Hunting Association, which would eventually like to build some sort of building on the property, these claims are unfounded. Hunting association attorney Alison Sweet Zieff said that gunshot noise, if any is audible to residents in the area at all, would largely be drowned out by arriving and departing air traffic at the nearby Nantucket Memorial Airport, according to a study of NHA's shooting range proposal done by Thalheimer Associates of Natick, Mass., which determined that noise levels would "easily comply with the Nantucket Noise Bylaw."

Zieff argues that the location, and its long history of shooting range activities, makes it the ideal spot for the proposed shooting range.

All three ranges - archery, skeet and handgun and rifle target shooting - are pointed north-northwest away from any houses. Target and skeet shooters will be firing into the old railroad bed traversing the northern portion of the property from a depression 24.5 feet below the grade of Milestone Road. Russell's Way and Wigwam Road are at similar grades, Zieff said, and for someone to fire in that direction, they would need to turn 154 degrees, and hike out of the low spot and away from the shooting area.

"I think we addressed all of that," said Zieff. "If there is shooting going on, there will be a range safety officer there. The whole idea was to take what was already going on there and make it safe."

Zieff added that the hunting association intends to close off all other access to the property and hopes to share a roadway with the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8608. The shooting range would also serve Nantucket's law enforcement personnel and be used for hunter education courses. A building for the Nantucket Hunting Association is not planned in the immediate future.

"Down the road, they want to do a clubhouse," said Zieff. "Once they get their permitting, they can apply for grants to improve the site and at some point, do a clubhouse."

The ZBA will hear the NHA's proposal at its Jan. 11

meeting at 1 p.m. at 2 Fairgrounds Road. I