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SANTA FE, N.M. — The shotgun-shell and trash-riddled area known as Camel Tracks west of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport could soon become the site of a structured shooting range, which excites some recreational shooters looking for a safe place to blast targets and upsets some residents in the nearby community of La Cieneguilla.

But officials say there is a lot of work to do before the range is a done deal.

The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish filed an application with the Bureau of Land Management in late January to turn what is already a popular shooting spot into a structured shooting range with different areas for pistols, rifles and archery, according to a map on Game and Fish’s website.

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Taos BLM Field Manager Sarah Schlanger said she told Game and Fish that her office wouldn’t be able to review the application until this month due to a heavy workload, and now she says her staff is making sure it understands what Game and Fish is asking for.

“We are at the very beginning of the process of analyzing the application,” Schlanger said.

Schlanger said BLM is allowed to let others apply to use its federal lands for public use under the Recreation and Public Purposes Act, which she said allowed the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and Humane Society complex and Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe golf course to be built west of town.

After the application review, Schlanger said BLM will hold public “scoping sessions” as early as this summer, where residents can voice their concerns and learn more about the process.

She said the meetings will be in Santa Fe and maybe in La Cienega, since it’s closer to the site.

“It’s going to be a process and the public is going to be involved,” she said. “We’ll try to hold (the sessions) close to where the public interest is.”

One citizen opposed to the idea is La Cieneguilla resident and activist Jose Villegas, who said the shooting range will regularly disrupt what is otherwise a peaceful community.

He said he spends a lot of time praying nearby in the historic Capilla de San Antonio, part of an old pueblo site, and the gunshots from the Camel Tracks often disturb the peace. He fears a structured range would bring more noise and traffic.

“We want BLM to build a range far from the community,” he said. “I can’t pray without hearing boom boom from the outside. I’m tired of it, bro. I just want to be left alone to pray for my community.”

The shooting range would also be near the La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site, which includes hundreds of rock drawings on a mesa overlooking the Santa Fe River. In recent years, the BLM has added a parking lot for petroglyph hikers off of Paseo Rael/County Road 56, which is what Airport Road becomes as it veers south beyond the city limits.

Villegas said he has started a petition opposing the range and plans to present it to the Santa Fe County Commission and the City Council.

Rancher Jose Varela Lopez, then-president of the New Mexico Cattlemen’s Association and who said he owns private property next to the proposed site, spoke up against the proposed range at a September meeting of the state Game Commission at the Santa Fe Community College, according to the meeting’s minutes.

“I am concerned that, in the future, with this permanent facility, that I am going to be unable to use my land for anything but what I am doing right now, which is just grazing, and that would be taking my private property rights, so I would like to ask that there be some public process whereby folks that are concerned about the shooting range are able to speak to the Commission or (Game and Fish) director or whomever you believe is appropriate,” Varela Lopez said.

Commissioners told him to bring his concerns to Lance Cherry, Game and Fish education division chief of information.

Recreational shooting is legal on most BLM land, and shotguns shells and various targets, including TVs and other electronic appliances, are strewn about Camel Tracks.

Even the signs leading up to the area are speckled with bullet holes. Camel Tracks has also been known as a place for young people to hang out after dark.

“Considering that unregulated shooting occurs in the area, the department believes a more structured environment would offer the public a safer, cleaner, more user-friendly environment for recreational target shooting,” Game and Fish said in a written statement Thursday provided by media relations coordinator Karl Moffatt.

The new range would be the first structured outdoor shooting range in the Santa Fe area since the Caja del Rio Gun Club shooting range near what is now the Municipal Recreation Complex closed in 1996 for construction of a road to the new county landfill. The Caja del Rio Gun Club was essentially absorbed into the Albuquerque-based Rio Grande Practical Shooting Club thereafter.

The idea of a formal shooting range in the Camel Tracks area has been floated before. In 2008, there was discussion between the BLM and the National Guard of establishing a 40- to 80-acre range where guardsmen could do small-arms training, Game and Fish could hold hunting classes and the public could shoot. The National Rifle Association was consulted, according a Journal North article published at the time.

A safer place to shoot?

The idea of a structured range excites 28-year-old Santa Fe resident Saibhang Khalsa, who was at Camel Tracks Wednesday afternoon with several boxes of ammo, and guns of all shapes and sizes. He said he has a membership to the Northern Rio Grande Sportsmens Club in La Puebla, but said he would prefer an outdoor range closer to home. Khalsa said he only comes to the Camel Tracks a couple of times a year because of safety concerns and he said a structured range would alleviate them.

“I’ve been out here, and people just come out and you can tell just by looking at them that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing,” Khalsa said. “Although it’s nice to have the freedom to come out and do whatever you want, it needs to be a safe environment.

If there were other people here right now, I would probably just leave and I don’t want to have to feel that I have to do that. I think any structured range is going to have rules that are enforced and, just by that fact, it’s going to create a safer environment.”

An unidentified Game and Fish official said at a Game Commission meeting last May that the range may cost $80,000 to $100,000 to maintain annually. But Game and Fish said in its statement Thursday, “Construction costs and timelines have yet to be determined and any previously stated figures or timelines were estimates made for planning purposes.”

There is still a lot of public input to be taken and environmental analysis to be done before the range moves forward.

“It’s important for people to know that we have an application that undergoes a full environmental review,” the BLM’s Schlanger said. “We don’t want the public to feel like it’s already happening and that it’s a done deal.”

Spent shotgun shells litter the ground at Camel Tracks, where the state Game and Fish Department has applied to develop a formal shooting range.