Sportshooters in Cooper Landing may soon have a new facility to sharpen their aim. The borough planning commission will take up a motion this week to lease 66 acres for a new shooting range.
After taking fire for seven decades, the gun range in Cooper Landing is being retired. There have been talks about moving the range for at least 20 years, but it wasn’t until 2013 that residents decided the current location on Bean Creek Road needed a quieter, safer tenent. That area has developed a fair amount since 1947 and so they looked east to find a more isolated spot.
They found one about halfway between town and Tern Lake at Mile 40 of the Sterling highway. It’s 66.5 acres of borough land, adjacent to the Dave’s Creek gravel pit. That’s owned by the state DOT. The other neighbors are the Chugach National Forest and some state DNR land. Shooters would fire to the north, toward the ridgeline.
Two other locations were considered, at the organic dump site on Snug Harbor road and the Juneau Bench area. One downside to the Dave’s Creek spot is that, despite the fact you can only get to it through the utility corridor, it’s not ready for electric service.
But it checked all the other boxes for the Cooper Landing Advisory Planning Commission, which signed off on the plan earlier this month. To get it all done, the borough assembly will have to approve some amendments to the Cooper Landing land use portion of the borough’s comprehensive plan. There’s a public hearing scheduled for that on February 20th.