Shooting park gives back, though it’s losing money

By Joe Schoenmann

Sunday, July 11, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Fourth of July firecrackers echo the gunfire that helped the colonies win their independence more than 200 years ago.

During last weekend’s Independence Day celebration at the Clark County Shooting Park, you could have heard the real thing. And for active and retired military, the shooting was free.

The park gave free rounds of trap or skeet shooting, or free passes for the rifle-pistol center and archery ranges, to active and retired members of the military, including the reserves and National Guard.

“It is great to be able to give a little something back to the soldiers and veterans who have given us all so much,” said Commissioner Tom Collins, whose district includes the park.

That’s great news. Does it also mean the $61 million park is doing so well it can afford to hand out freebies?

The park appears to be doing as well as county parks staff thought it would — which means it’s losing money.

The county doesn’t expect the park to break even until it has been in operation for three years.

In the meantime, the county is subsidizing the park with money from a fund drawing from fees for other programs such as Safekey, which provides after-school activities for children.

The park opened last fiscal year. The numbers for that period show revenue of $356,000 and expenditures of about $1.02 million, meaning the county has tapped the fund for about $661,000 to keep the bullets flying.

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The Sun reported recently on the county’s use of a device called the Rodenator to kill gophers at Sunset Park, where they’re wreaking havoc.

The device injects into gopher holes propane and oxygen that, when sparked, create an explosion.

Readers e-mailed asking whether birth control for gophers had been considered as a less-explosive solution.

Based on a scouring of the Internet, it appears to be a fairly common question.

But the answer is that no one has heard of gopher birth control.

Gophers thrive on the succulent roots of grasses and other plants they tunnel beneath, so finding an efficient way of tricking them into eating birth control isn’t an easy proposition.

Looks as if the county will have to stick with the Rodenator.

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Continuing the theme of Southern Nevada pests, Lee Szymborski read with some interest the Sun’s June 28 article about Clark County’s pigeon control efforts. Szymborski is the former drummer for the Chambers Brothers band, which had a hit in the 1960s with “Time Has Come Today.”

Does he have a problem with bird droppings on his drum kit or what?

No, but he used to have a pigeon problem at his house. He claims to have cleared it up using a secret formula.

For the past three months, Szymborski said, he has doused bird seed with the concoction, and the pigeons haven’t returned to leave their droppings on his house.

“It doesn’t kill them, they just don’t come back,” he said. Sure, they might fly over to do their business on a neighbor’s home, he admitted, but they leave his alone.

“I tried everything, I even invested $80 on this fake flying owl that you put on a pole and it flaps its wings,” Szymborski said. “Now, the flying rats are gone. And it’s a wonderful thing. My nice pristine roof, oh, it looks so beautiful now!”

What’s in the concoction and how’d he come up with it?

Don’t know. Szymborski won’t say because he might market it.

“I’m reading and laughing at the article, because one guy shoots them, then they spend this money for bags of birth control,” he said, laughing. “And they’ve got to watch them and learn their feeding patterns? (Laughs again.) And this stuff I got works so good, I’ve still got my 5-pound bag of bird seed in the garage.”