When target practice starts at the Sherman Avenue firing range in New Haven, all the neighbors can hear it, so officials want to move it indoors. The outdoor range is often in use by local, state and federal law enforcement officers.
"We need a good training facility so we can have very well-trained professional police officers, but we also have a problem here in the noise it causes for the community and the disruption it causes," said New Haven Police Chief James Lewis.
Because of that noise, and the stress it puts on everyone hearing it, New Haven wants to build an indoor firing range either on the Sherman Avenue site or at another location.
"You can see we have four schools within a half-mile radius of this range, and thousands, I'm not talking hundreds, thousands of households living within that radius. When you let loose here, you get a sense of what it's like to live near this," said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman visited the facility Monday. He has already requested $225,000 in funding in the fiscal year 2010 appropriations process. He's waiting for the bill to be passed.
"The opportunity is to pool our resources to build a new firing range that will have essentially zero sound psychological impact on the neighborhood, and will be a first-rate modern facility for all the law enforcement officers who train here," Lieberman said.
The entire project will cost $6 million.
