A proposed shooting range is no longer in the cards for a community just outside of Payson.
Board members of the Alabama-based nonprofit Civilian Marksmanship Program voted to withdraw their plan from the Bureau of Land Management.
This comes after months of controversy surrounding the project. Some community members said it would be too close to nearby homes and too noisy and unsafe.
Chief Commercial Officer Greg Raines said they had worked on the project with the BLM and other local leaders for the past four years. To them, West Mountain was “a perfect place to expand.”
He said their previous projects “had a little bit of pushback, but nothing to this magnitude.”
“It was just overwhelming, and, you know, just very surprising on my part.”
The pushback, along with a cost appraisal that was denied by the BLM, ultimately led to the withdrawal of their plans.
Payson Mayor Bill Wright supported the project and worked with the BLM and the Civilian Marksmanship Program to make it happen. He said a lot of people believed that the only motivation for the city was monetary, and “although that's part of it, that was not the main determining factor.”
“We have a very real safety concern up in that area where there's a lot of unsupervised shooting that goes on up there.”
Wright is referring to incidents on West Mountain that have led to bullets hitting property in the nearby community of Genola. He hoped a supervised range with safety measures in place would make it easier to prevent dangerous behavior in the area.
Rather than resolve it, resident Norm Avery thought the range would have exacerbated the problem.
“Putting more guns up there is not the solution. If there's some risk then it needs to be addressed in a different way.”
Avery was one of many community members against the plans during a public comment period set up by the BLM.
“We followed the process, and I felt like we were heard,” he said. “And everybody listened, and I think everybody and the end kind of said, ‘Nah, this is not a good idea, including CMP.’”
Raines said the company will continue to look for the right place for a new gun range. However, they won’t be looking in Utah, and they won’t be looking for public land.
