Gov. Phil Bryant couldn’t have asked for a better Friday.
He spent the morning with his 9-month-old grandson Henry before traveling to Columbus to help christen a new small arms firing range on Yorkville Square Road. Friday night, he attended a crawfish festival in DeSoto County.
“Babies, guns and crawfish — all in one day” Bryant told the crowd gathered at the firing range grand opening. “It doesn’t get any better than that in Mississippi.”
He also got a souvenir for his showing up in Columbus: a Ruger handgun he broke in on the range before leaving for his crawfish engagement.
Bryant joined a host of local officials and Columbus Air Force Base personnel on Friday celebrating the grand opening of the nearly $1.9 million shooting range.
The range — a partnership between the state, city, Lowndes County and CAFB — is a state-of-the-art facility where law enforcement and Air Force base personnel can complete firearms training. Burks-Mordecai Builders was the contractor who helped build it.
The range includes 14 lanes for up to 25-meter shooting and a minimum of four lanes for 100-meter shooting. It also includes classroom space, an indoor viewing and control room and other amenities.
Lowndes Board of Supervisors President Harry Sanders said the public would have opportunities to use the range, as well, at certain times.
“Whether that’ll be one day a week, two days a month or what, we don’t know yet,” he said. “That all still has to be worked out.”
A need
CAFB closed its shooting range more than a decade ago, according to 14th Flying Wing Commander and Lt. Col. John Nichols. Since then the base has used a smaller firing range locally, and airmen often travels several hours out of state for their firearms training.
With the new facility, built to military specifications, he said CAFB would save about $128,000 annually in travel and other expenses.
“What makes this nice is that it’s state-of-the-art,” Nichols said.
Nichols said the Air Force base still needs to completely furnish the shooting range before it is fully operational, but he is “highly confident” that will happen soon.
Nichols, Bryant and others who spoke applauded the partnership that saw the project to fruition.
“(As a state) there’s no money we’ve ever invested in anything that is more important than this,” Bryant, a former sheriff’s deputy, said.
City, county yet to work out specifics on operating range
That partnership on the local level, however, has seen its share of hitches, including funding inequity and a rift between city and county officials on how to operate the firing range.
Initially, the city and county each committed $203,000 in grant match toward the project. When CAFB asked for 100-meter shooting accommodations, though, the county absorbed $118,000 more in costs, while the city declined committing more funds. The county has also contributed $70,000 in in-kind labor. The city gave $27,000 in in-kind labor. The Mississippi Development Authority provided $1.2 million for the range.
In late April, the city proposed — via a letter to Sanders from Mayor Robert Smith — running the facility with its own personnel and charging the county for half the costs each year. The county, though, voted to take full responsibility of shooting range operations without any personnel or financial support from the city.
Both Smith and Sanders on Friday said the two sides were no closer to agreeing on how to manage the range.
“At the present time we’re not any closer,” Smith told The Dispatch. “Hopefully, in a short period of time, we can work it out as far as management, even if it means we get a third party to come in and run it.”
Sanders maintains the county should, at least, be the lead agency on running the facility, partly because it’s invested the most and already has trained staff on-hand, and also because he said the county administrated the grant.
“The city can catch up on the money or train people just like we have,” Sanders said. “Those are all fixable things. But the fact remains — and the reason I’m so adamant about this — that we’re the lead on the grant.”
The Golden Triangle Development LINK assisted the city and county in procuring funding for the project, and it also organized Friday’s grand opening event. LINK Executive Director Joe Max Higgins said he appreciated the work each entity had put toward the project, as well as Friday’s standing-room crowd.
“Every time we do something for Columbus Air Force Base, we always get good turnout,” Higgins said. “Every time we do something for the city or the county, we get good turn out. And it seems like when the governor comes we get great turnout.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant speaks at the opening of the Columbus firing range Friday. Photo by: Luisa Porter/Dispatch Staff
