Representatives of the Omaha Police Department, the City of Omaha and the Washington County Sheriff's Office did their best at a town hall meeting in Fort Calhoun last Wednesday to assuage any concerns over a proposed firearms training facility near the Fort Atkinson State Historical Park.
Whether the nearly 300 area residents who attended the meeting at the Northern Lights Venue were swayed by the comprehensive one-hour presentation and 2 ½ hour Q&A remains to be seen, but OPD’s strategy to answer all questions created a spirited if not occasionally raucous event.
“After three hours, one thing we’re happy about is we got to present the information and get it up. We put a lot of work and research and effort into this, and we wanted to share with the residents of Fort Calhoun so we were able to accomplish that tonight,” OPD Deputy Chief Steve Cerveny said in an interview with the Washington County Pilot-Tribune.
“We have had people who support, and we had a substantial number of individuals that were vocally opposed. So I can’t gauge exactly where we’re at,” he said “We are willing to work with leaders of Fort Calhoun, city leaders and the residents to make this work, because we are excited about it. We feel it’s beneficial for so many reasons. …”
Craig Horobik, a Fort Calhoun resident who attended the meeting and passionately addressed the panel, stayed afterward to talk to OPD officers. He told the Pilot-Tribune the presentation was excellent.
“I have every reason to believe it’s going to be safe and secure. I have no problem walking by it, walking around it, being near it. My concern is still what they can’t get rid of, which is the quality of life issue,” Horobik said.
“Whatever that amount is, we won't be able to get back."
Fort Calhoun Mayor Mitch Robinson said it went as he expected it to.
“We had a lot of people that they actually listened, and they asked very good questions, which is what this was about,” Robinson said.
“People will digest everything that they’ve heard. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask more questions. Look and see what our meetings are and what’s going to happen, what’s going to be on the agenda.”
Moving forward
Cerveny said the next steps will be negotiations with Fort Calhoun officials to lease the city-owned, 30-acre-plus lot on County Road 34.
“We’ve had some preliminary discussions with them. They’ve indicated they want to retain ownership of the site and that they’d be interested in a long-term lease. Again, that’s acceptable to us, and we’ve talked about potential possibilities of making a lump-sum payment on the front end, which might allow the city of Fort Calhoun to do a single major project, or paying on an annual basis like most leases would be. And we’re willing to do either,” Ceverny said during the town hall.
Should a lease be approved, a conditional use permit would lay out the specific parameters the land would be used for.
“Not only the construction of the site, but also the use of the site thereafter once that’s approved by the planning board and the city council,” he said. “Those are the rules by which the City of Omaha and anybody else who uses that site — the Washington County Sheriff and others — would have to live by.”
The plan
If approved, design and construction would follow. Town hall organizers created numerous easel displays with artists’ renderings, topographical maps overlaid with decibel measurements and other information for the public.
As planned, the training facility features three outdoor shooting ranges running west to east, away from Fort Calhoun, with 50-, 100- and 300-yard lanes surrounded and interwoven with 25-foot tall earthen safety berms consistent with those found at OPD’s current facility in Elkhorn.
The bullet “impact” berm will be made of layers of concrete, steel and a newly created rubber-like adhesive material that would be replaced regularly.
If approved, the training facility would also have office and classroom space, parking and a perimeter security fence.
The need
Panelists stressed time and again the need for a new facility. OPD’s current range was originally built for the Elkhorn Police Department before the city was annexed in 2007. Featuring one range, Omaha’s westward expansion has surrounded the site. Combined with the number of law enforcement agencies training there, officials say the Elkhorn site has outlived its usefulness.
Early proposals indicated that OPD, the Washington County Sheriff and the FBI would use the site, with other area agencies likely to book training time.
WCSO Lt. Alex Judkins told the audience his department can no longer shoot at a nearby private range, having instead to travel more than an hour and paying twice the price in range fees alone. Training time has been reduced from 96 hours to 60 a year.
“Everything we train on is really important, and I would only have 60 hours to try to accomplish all the same training,” Judkins said.
“This is an answer for your sheriff's office to be able to train to be able to do the things that we need to do,” he said.
Washington County Sheriff Mike Robinson was blunt in his assessment, noting the Jan. 6 shootout in Arlington and two 2023 murders in Fort Calhoun.
“We're not just a sleepy, quiet, peaceful community. The wolves are out there. The wolves want to come in. Now what are we going to do about it? Getting the training and have the people available respond and stop this crime? We’ve been able to do it. But I want to reiterate, this isn’t just an OPD range. This is ours, also. This is ours. We need this," Robinson said.
Several speakers during the Q&A segment, with applause from attendees, expressed the community’s unanimity when it came to its support of the sheriff's office and law enforcement in general.
“I will tell you that not one person that I talk to, not one person, doesn't think that Washington County doesn’t need a place to train for firearms, and not one person does not back our Washington County Sheriff's Department 100%. Not one person. But every person I talk to, outside of three people that are in this room here, are in opposition to this 100%,” said a man identifying himself as Justin Thompson.
The use
If constructed, OPD training officers would continue to conduct live fire exercises on weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., said firearms and tactics instructor Sgt. Jon Gordon.
In 2024, 84% of the training was conducted from April 1 to Oct. 31, with July set aside for range maintenance and to avoid the summer heat. Gordon said the new range would likely follow the same protocol, noting there would be occasional training conducted in the late fall and early spring to approximate nighttime conditions.
As much sidearm training is conducted at OPD’s indoor range, the proposed facility would primarily be used for rifle practice. Gordon said they would expect more than 75 days to focus on AR-15 and handgun training. There are currently around 500 OPD officers voluntarily trained on the semi-automatic rifle.
With a standard seven-person training session using 300 rounds per person, at least 2,100 rounds would sporadically be fired daily. Gordon said there is robust monitoring of every shooter with gun safety a priority.
“The vast majority of the day involves coaching, setup, breaks and reloading ammunition and other opportunities before they even ever fire the gun,” he said.
Less than 21 days would be used to train on larger caliber rifles, 12 gauge shotguns, small explosives to breach a door or window, and robot training for bomb disposal. On rare occasions, the range may be used to detonate a rogue grenade or other improvised explosive device, or a burn barrel for old ammunition.
“We would work with the mayor and your city leaders on an annual basis to identify any and every particular day where they would like us to avoid,” Gordon said. “If you were to have a spontaneous city event, you have a homecoming for someone. You have another event. If it’s reasonable for us to be notified, we can work with your mayor and cancel that day. We’re going to do it. Our goal is to be a good neighbor to you.”
The location
Since 2021, Omaha officials have been searching for a new area for the training facility. OPD Training Unit Commander Lt. Queno Martinez said the criteria included proximity to the Omaha Public Safety Training Center near Bennington, access to paved roads, “big enough to give us a three-range complex, and last and definitely one of the most important, is we needed a long-term uninhabited surface danger zone area.
“We passed it on to a lot of our community partners in the area, and then we learned of a potential site near Fort Calhoun that could meet all of our needs. We did a feasibility study ... and that study indicated that this current site met all those criteria,” Martinez said.
That wasn't enough to satisfy a majority of the audience, as many wondered why the City of Omaha didn’t find a suitable site in Douglas County. Others wondered about the abandoned Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station, which once had a firing range.
“It's got a big road going down to it,” said one attendee. “If you're going to spend millions building a new facility, why not do it there?”
The sound
The predominant concern voiced by citizens was noise.
A Florida-based soundscape design firm specializing in firing ranges was hired “to evaluate the sound levels and distances away from the proposed range in and around the town of Fort Calhoun, with the proposed mitigation features of the ranges included in the models,” said Gary Siebein, senior principal at Siebein Acoustics.
Last September, sound engineers took long- and short-term baseline sound-level measurements — including at Fort Atkinson, city hall and the public works building — to create a three-dimensional computer model of the proposed site and the surrounding areas built out to a distance of two miles from the range.
“We build the models, we put the topography in, we put ground cover, the roads and the surface textures, the buildings and all of the other infrastructure in addition to the range,” Siebein said.
The modeling showed with the berms and the ranges’ target area to the east, gunfire decibel levels would be in the low 60s — comparable to a normal conversation from three feet away or a hair dryer at 15 feet.
Many Q&A speakers questioned the study’s findings, notably because it used computer modeling of gunfire. OPD said it was open to firing live rounds into portable targets at the proposed site for a live demonstration.
For more than a few attendees, volume was not as much a concern as the effect the firing range would have on veterans, children and animals. Still others worried about the effect on tourism as well as general peace of mind.
“It’s either going to be, like I said, it sounds like we’re in a war zone for 10 minutes every day, or we’re going to have to put up with that constant do-do-do-do, and I don't know what you're [thinking] which one's worse, to be honest with you,” said Horobik, addressing the panel.
