News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Political salvation at undisclosed location

By Bill Moss, Published: April 11, 2018

The third time might be the charm for Sheriff Charlie McDonald, who has a site for a shooting range and tactical training center after more than two years of looking.

It’s rare for the Board of Commissioners to insert a major policy or capital decision into its regular agenda with no advance notice. That’s what happened April 2. When commissioners emerged from a closed session, the law enforcement training center had popped up on an overhead projector. It was the first time in a year that commissioners had broached the subject during a board meeting and the sheriff himself had dropped the subject, at least publicly.
McDonald’s first effort to site a tactical training center, in August 2015, triggered a huge uprising in the Green River community. When residents packed the county commission meeting room, commissioners summarily killed that idea. Trying to do the sheriff a favor in return, the commissioners endorsed County Manager Steve Wyatt’s recommendation to use free land at Blue Ridge Community College. That idea sparked even more widespread opposition. For starters, the BRCC site quadrupled the original cost, free land or not. Moving a firing range indoors, abating lead pollution, soundproofing walls so students next door could concentrate on math equations and English essays were expensive add-ons that escalated the cost to a jaw-dropping $20 million. If good ideas have a thousand fathers, bad ones become an orphan. The training center was looking like McDonald’s boondoggle and soon even he was running from it. By March of 2017, Commissioner Bill Lapsley had declared his opposition to a $20 million training center. By the time county officials cut the ribbon on the new Innovative High School last summer, it was clear that BRCC was out, though no one would say so publicly.
The training center laid in a shallow grave until last month, when Commissioner Grady Hawkins neatly sketched an escape plan for McDonald, a few short weeks before his Republican primary contest with Lowell Griffin, the Polk County sheriff’s captain McDonald sacked in November 2014. McDonald the Reformer has worked hard to cultivate support among lots of constituencies and he does not look too vulnerable in this election. The pop pop pop of a firing range next to a high school in a time of heightened anxiety over school shootings may have been the sheriff’s biggest liability. Bad optics.
At a joint news conference on school security three weeks ago, McDonald — flanked by commissioners and School Board members nodding their assent — vowed to deploy armed guards at all 23 public schools. Right on cue, Hawkins stepped forward to declare that now is the time for a cheaper but still excellent training center that among other things would drill deputies in school security and active shooter confrontation.
So, somewhere, in an undisclosed wilderness location that Wyatt describes as “extremely remote,” a training center is what we shall have. The instinct for electoral survival and the gun violence crisis met, got married and birthed an extrication maneuver for the sheriff and the county commissioners.
Ain’t politics grand?