Open-Air Shooting Range Debate Heats Up Again in Erial

Spring is in the air and so are bullets in the Erial section of Gloucester Township.

A decades-old debate about the Iron Horse Rifle and Pistol Club, and an open-air shooting range they use on the Waddell farm on Garwood Road, has popped up again, just like the first flowers of the season.

"It's getting warm again and residents are opening their windows or sitting out on their patios and they hear the guns being shot," said township Council President Glen Bianchini. "We get it."

Just to drive the point home, four dozen Erial residents turned out Monday for a council work session at the Municipal Hall. They demanded council shut down the shooting range or restrict the hours of operation.

Bianchini said he and the council want to find a solution "that will be fair for everyone."

Council and Mayor David Mayer hired the Gibbons law firm as an outside counsel in the matter. The issue is the gun club and farm were grandfathered into recent ordinances that restrict the discharge of firearms within a certain distance of homes or other buildings. Residents say their homes have been struck by stray bullets from the range and they're also concerned about schools in the area, including Timber Creek Regional High School.

Bianchini said he wasn't aware of any safety issues from the gun range that affected the high school. He said a stray bullet could have hit a nearby home but it wasn't immediately clear if it came from the range.

He said the mayor has met with both sides of the dispute at least three times and Watson Waddell, the current property owner, agreed to to change the direction of the range and install dirt berms as barriers.

The farm was here decades before the school and residential developments that have popped up around it. Lawyers the council hired are going to have to figure out what parameters the council and mayor have to regulate the club and farm as an existing land use.

The firing range is a pre-existing, non-conforming use—one that a municipality cannot just "zone out" due to complaints by neighbors.

"At one time, zoning might have permitted that (land include a firing range),"  David Carlamere, the township solicitor said in December. "But whether it did or not, in the '70s and '80s when the land-use laws really developed and the zoning changed, that made that existing use a non-conforming use, and you really can't zone out a non-conforming use. You can control it from expanding and all of those things, but you can't zone out a pre-existing non-conforming use."

Exactly what it was Iron Horse was approved to do on the property seems to be at the heart of this dispute.

A description on Iron Horse Rifle and Pistol Club's Yahoo! group page notes that Waddell's mother, Roxanne, allowed the group to begin using her land for target practice in 1959 "with the stipulations that we observe the Sabbath and respect God's creations."

Watson Waddell, who inherited the farm from his mother, said Wednesday he "can't second guess what the council is doing."

"Whatever will be will be," Waddell said. "Whatever legal issues there are, we'll settle them."

For more on this issue, read:

• 'It Sounds Like Cannons'
• Bullet Removed from Erial House
• Gun Club Issues on the Table
• Safety Remains an Issue with Residents Near Rifle Club
• Township to Hire Land-Use Attorney for Gun Club Dispute

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