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StumbleANSWERS CLARK COUNTY:
Shooting park gives back, though it’s losing money
Sunday, July 11, 2010 | 2 a.m.
Tom Collins
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.
•••
Rodenator: Boom! Goodbye Gophers
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del.icio.usThe gopher infestation - and subsequent bitings and twisted ankles - at Sunset Park in Henderson has led to some drastic measures. Four to five days a week, a park maintenance worker hunts the fields for gopher holes, armed with the newest in humane gopher-killing weaponry: the Rodenator. See it in action in this video: when a worker finds a fresh mound, he uses the long rod of the Rodenator to pump propane into the gopher's burrow, and then "boom!," the gophers have been euthanized.
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.
•••
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.”
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Yea thats a good place to get funds for a shooting range....
Perfect place to practice for liberal season should it ever become legal to hunt.
@its2hot Im already hunting you buddy
Perhaps The Sun might consider prying the anti-gun Mr. Schoenmann off his chair and actually sending him out to the Shooting Park to get some first hand impressions. In the style of today's popular sarcastic reportage, Mr. Schoenmann implies that a business whose Grand Opening was in March of 2010 should be turning a profit already when it is common practice that any new business venture have enough capital to cover operating costs for at least the first three years before any profit can be expected. He further implies that the Shooting Park is stealing operating funds from children's programs, which is untrue. And by limiting the photo coverage to pictures of politicians taken at the Grand Opening ceremony, he has missed the whole point of the Shooting Park. It is a beautiful, well planned and executed facility built to provide Las Vegans and visitors with a world class, supervised, safe, friendly and affordable place to shoot recreationally, improve their skill at arms and teach their children gun safety. 47 per cent of Las Vegans own a handgun. The Clark County Shooting Park gives them a safe place to practice and helps prevent the danger to themselves and others caused by shooting in the Las Vegas Wash or desert shooting within the basin. Mr. Schoenmann should be promoting the Park, not denigrating it.
The Shooting Park is a good idea that has TERRIBLE timing and even worse planning. In a time unemployment is at a record high,where pools are shut down due to lack of funding, and county employees are losing their jobs to lack of money, how can anybody justify having a shooting park open thats not making money? I just dont get it. And for those that have guns, whats wrong with going to your local gun range and shooting there? If 47% of Las Vegas owns guns (So you say) then why arent these 47% using the shooting range? And what about the other 53% of residents that dont own guns? The shooting park does us no good and we're still paying taxes for it! At least with county pools and childrens programs, we know how that money is being used and know that its being put to good use. It might be time to wash our hands clean of this shooting park, sell it to a private company, let them run it. I just think us tax payers are wasting our hard earned money with this
1. The Park is a local employer, adding jobs not taking them away.
2. No business can be expected to show a profit from the day the doors open. The Park has been officially open less than four months. Give it a chance.
3. This IS your local gun range. Beautiful view from up there too.
4. The $61 million dollar Shooting Park construction project was completed without using a penny of taxpayer money. Space limits here, so ask your county commissioner how this was done.
We can respectfully agree to disagree, but facts are facts.
If the place is losing money, raise the fee(s) or close it. Done. It is a lot more entertaining to watch the Rednecks shoot each other...
Well barkeep, I don't use any of those pools and no one that I know uses any county, or city, pools so why should OUR tax money be wasted on those things that do nothing but waste water by evaporating thousands of gallons per year? And I believe if you care to check the facts the county pools have NEVER broke even with expenditures so let's close them along with every other county recreational program that does not make money. If it does not turn a profit, who needs it. Or, to clarify your words, 'If I don't use it no one else should have it!'
How many people know that Federal Funds were used to construct this shooting park? Funds were obtain and allocated by Harry Reid. This is exactly what Reid does, get Federal Funds for he thinks are for jobs, but in reality if for something that is used for just a few citizen. Don't you think funds good of been put to better use for a majority of the citizens. I heard about the funds for the shooting park and just said to myself, once again funds for something that is only going to be used for 1 percent of the population, while 120,000 people need jobs, while senior daycare are struggling to find funds, where roads and other infrastructor are in need of repair. I think a shoot park could of been put on the back burner while other more pressing issues could of been resolved. Vote Harry Reid out of office, he represents only a few, while the majority hang on to what we have and try to help others in need.
I think the CCSP business model was flawed from the start. The local politicians who built this national monument to the NRA wanted to have a facility which has all the attributes of a public park such as being low cost, open to the public and more importantly to them to be used for good community PR and election campaigning outreach to NRA members.
However, after the last seven months of operation, the County should now have realized their blunder that the CCSP operating costs are very high and the market size of actual sports shooters is seasonal and very small. This has resulted in attendance that won't bring in enough visitors to make a profit, or even break even. Where was their market research? Who in their right mind is going to go out shooting at an outdoor facility in the summer when it averages 105 degrees and there are not even any shade coverings at the half mile long trap area.
Whenever I have been up there, the massive RV area along with the overbuilt trap area stretching as far as the eye can see is never more than 10% occupied. Someone should be held accountable for this overbuilt blunder.
Let the NRA pay for it instead of laying off County workers and vote the park's mastermind Harry Reid out of office. Harry Reid has been up at the shooting park at least three times at press events as the shooting park continues to hold multiple grand openings thinking that will improve attendance. Really Harry, don't you have more important things to do than to bask in this financial sinkhole you spearheaded for Clark County.
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"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.
Did Commissioner Collins pay for this "give back a little" out of his pockets or did we all "give back a little" in form of tax dollars used?
Is Collins running for re-election?
A new shooting park in the Northwest opened up over the weekend. It is located right in front of the Costco in Summerlin. Metro was getting some practice in at close range. This is a Privately funded park. The taxpayers will only have to pay victims families when they screw up!!
You have gotta be kidding me!! We're wasting a million dollars a year for the next tree years on the Clark County Shooting Park when we have people being laid off,Safekey and public schools are cutting back affecting our children's' educations, and closing public pools so that children in that area have no place to swim. I wanted to see what the CCSP was about so I drove over to take a look for myself. I was amazed that they would even consider calling that a "park" since it did not resemble any park that I have ever seen or taken my child to. Not a blade of grass, no benches, no trees, no swings, none of the basics that one would typically find in a TRUE PARK. The only thing that I could possibly think of why they included the word Park in the name was so that they could somehow use the taxpayers dollars to subsidize a fake park, using our money for something whose name makes the true nature of it totally misleading. The true name should be the Clark County Shooting Range.It should be called what it is. I am totally amazed that the Clark County Commissioners would rather keep a shooting range open so that middle aged men in their John Deere caps had a place to go and shoot their big guns to compensate for their shortcomings. The funds from Safekey and the Parks and Recreation Department should be used for legitimate parks and pools so the children can enjoy themselves; and not a phony park which is really a shooting range. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a shooting range - it is about the money. If it was a county golf course or some other taxpayer-funded extracurricular activity that was losing a million dollars a year and very few people where using it.I would be pissed about that too.where exactly are we going to get the money from? Oh yeah, the Tax payers because last I heard, we were broke - oh except for the funds being used to keep the Clark County Shooting Range open for business. Could the Clark County Commissioners be so out of touch with what is happening with the economy that they would continue to throw away a million dollars of taxpayers money each year to keep this money pit open?It's time to vote the park's mastermind Harry Reid and the county Commissioners out of office. Kudos to Joe Schoenmann for bringing this important information to the forefront.