For background, Pittsburgh is one of the only major cities in the US that trains its police on an outdoor shooting range near a residential neighborhood. The Highland Park range has been a thorn in the side of residents since at least 1989, but they have never convinced the city to transition to a quieter alternative, such as an indoor range or a more remote location. Emails from high ranking officials in the Gainey administration shed some light on the persistence of the outdoor range, as well as the administration’s approach to community relations.
In early October, Rebekkah Ranallo, at the time the manager of the mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, sent an email innocouosly titled Re: Budget Engagement Weekly Check In. In it she opined “I think the thing to be ready for in Larimer and in the Hill is the public safety center construction stuff. Folks don’t realize this is the HP shooting range. They think we are bringing back the cop city idea.” As we have seen, the administration actually is bringing back the cop city idea, but more on that later. Responding to Ranallo, David Hutchinson, currently Assistant Director of the city’s Office of Management and Budget in charge of capital and asset management, pointed out some facts of life. His email is worth quoting at length:
“Hey Rebekkah,
“Cop City” can have a lot of different meanings in people’s minds, so I want to be transparent about what we’re going forward with in the below project.
This would be a comprehensive training facility for all branches of public safety. The individual headquarters for Fire, EMS, and Police are planned to stay where they are.
An indoor firing range likely would not come online until 2032 at the earliest. Some believe this would replace the outdoor range, some (Public Safety, DPW) believe we will always need the outdoor firing range.
All of the below projected spending for the VA site is in lieu of, not in addition to, improvements to the outdoor firing range. There are currently no funds budgeted to construct improvements the designed improvements at the existing firing range.
There are tens of millions of dollars that will be needed in 2030 – 2032 that fall outside of our planning range but will be needed later.”
There’s a good bit to unpack here. One, Hutchinson is tacitly conceding that “Cop City” is a reasonable name for the project, but this is a minor point. Two, he’s pointing out that there will be no mitigation of the outdoor range before the indoor range is finished – and that won’t happen until at least 2032. Three, he admits there’s no price tag for the project yet. Presumably the administration’s plan is to just keep pouring money into the black hole until it’s full. And of course there’s the real kicker – “some (Public Safety, DPW) believe we will always need the outdoor firing range.”
You heard it here first, Highland Park. Public Safety, i.e. the cops, don’t think the outdoor range is ever going away. Hutchinson didn’t say why they might hold this opinion, but this gap had been filled in earlier in 2023 by Claire Mastroberardino, a senior project manager in the city’s Bureau of Facilities. Mastroberardino wrote the below in response to a suggestion from an environmental planner in Pittsburgh’s Department of City Planning that the firing range be moved indoors to “meet the community in the middle on the issue.”
“That said, I do want you to understand that it’s not as easy as saying build an indoor range. While an indoor range is already a part of the VA program, that program has not moved forward and I’ve received no direction other than continue with the status quo. There are a lot of considerations that need to be thought through and discussed between the Administration, the Police Bureau, and community residents.
To name a few:
1. Indoor ranges do not give Officers any opportunity to train in inclement weather, and it is in the best interest of the Pittsburgh community that our Officers are trained to the best of their abilities.2. Closing an existing range is expensive. There are minimum standards that the EPA requires and since this has operated as a firing range since the 1960s I’m not sure all that it entails, but according to what I have been researching it will be somewhere between 3-5 million to close it. You may actually be in a better position to answer the question as to what would be involved.
3. You may also be better equipped to answer the question as to what you can do with that land once you close the range, because I’ve heard it can’t be used for anything else ever, which seems excessive.
4. MPOETC (Municipal Police Officers’ Education and Training Commission) has minimum requirements for both handguns and rifles. Handguns is only 50′ (She probably means yards, not feet.), but I believe the rifle min is 100′ and that creates either a need to find a secondary area for rifle qualification or building a really big indoor range, which could be 12 million to cost prohibitive to build.
5. Maintaining an indoor range is extremely expensive. Given the size of the building we would need for recruit and in-service training, we would be looking at roughly one million per year to maintain the ventilation system. That is exclusive of lead remediation and other maintenance costs
6. Indoor ranges also come with monthly Officer health checks for both lead and hearing.
I could keep going, but those are the biggest impacts. Contrast that with the approximate $3 mil to rotate the existing range by 90 degrees, lower the noise impact in HP by about 20 decibels without increasing it by much in Larimer, and solve some of the water issues in that area.Again, as I said, it is not my decision how the City decides to move forward; however, as the MO (Mayor’s Office!) is well aware of the issues surrounding the range, you may want to forward communications directly to them.”
Once again, there’s a lot to digest. The first part of the email is obsolete, as we know now that the “VA program” is indeed moving forward, at least for now (see above link). However, we don’t have full specs, meaning that the new range might only be long enough for handgun training.
We also note that Mastroberardino is overly pessimistic concerning MPOETC’s required range for handgun qualification, which is actually only 25 yards. We were unable to find the corresponding document for rifle qualification, but assuming the distance is longer than for handguns, the basic problem remains. It is also possible that the Pittsburgh force has a higher standard of marksmanship than that required by MPOETC.
“12 million to cost prohibitive” is a ridiculously broad range, indicating that no one in City Hall has given any serious consideration to building an indoor shooting range long enough to accommodate rifle training.
It’s also clear from other emails that Mastroberardino’s advice to hold discussions “between the Administration, the Police Bureau, and community residents” is not being followed, at least for the residents. After receiving Hutchinson’s missive, an exasperated Rebekkah Ranallo, obviously hearing about these issues for the first time, asked a pointed question.
“Below is the boilerplate we have used in response to umpteen 311s and emails about the firing range. Please clarify if this is not in alignment with what Dave is saying below.
The Department of Public Works will request an allocation in the 2024 budget for designs to inform a feasible relocation of the range to a new site.“
This is when Lisa Frank, then as now Gainey’s Chief Operating and Administrative Officer, chimed in. She had a solution.
“I think it’s important that we talk about this tonight in the same way we have been talking about it for the past year — we have budgeted funds to engage a consultant to help us evaluate our options for needed training facilities for our Public Safety personnel, including, importantly, the desire of people in Highland Park to relocate the shooting range.”
From these emails it seems obvious that even if an indoor range is eventually built as part of Pittsburgh Cop City, the outdoor range will still see regular use, and the administration is doing everything it can to conceal this fact from the Highland Park residents who have been listening to near-constant gunfire for decades. Nobody from the neighborhood group Highland Park Community Council was included in the above emails, and none of the city’s emails to HPCC that we have seen mention any of the difficulties with replacing the range.
An optimist might point out that reduced use of the outdoor range is still preferable to the current situation, but this view ignores some financial realities. One of the other problems revealed in the emails is that there is a severe shortage of police shooting ranges in Allegheny County. The only other two are the FBI’s range in Monroeville, and the one operated by the Penn Hills police, both of which are mostly tied up by their home agencies. Every other police department in the county presumably has to travel outside the county or lease time on private ranges. If Pittsburgh’s outdoor range suddenly opens up, we can expect the Pittsburgh police to be bombarded with requests from local police departments to use it. Those pleas will be hard to resist, especially if they come with money attached.
Let’s also keep in mind that from the cops’ perspective they already have a perfectly good firing range. Any available money to replace it will be subject to attempts to divert it to things like increased officer salaries or more “less lethal” toys – items that the cops actually want. If Cop City construction encounters cost overruns (and as a government construction project it’s virtually guaranteed to), the indoor range is likely to be the first thing on the chopping block. With the economy likely heading into a recession, the temptation to cut costs by eliminating the indoor firing range will only increase.