Permit application for shooting range withdrawn

The man who proposed a commercial shooting range near Echo Lake has withdrawn his application for a conditional use permit after a contentious hearing before the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee on Thursday.

It will not appear on the agenda for the Flathead County Board of Adjustment’s June 7 meeting, where a final decision on the permit would have been made.

Michael Krachun emailed the Flathead County Planning and Zoning Department on Friday to withdraw his application. The advisory committee had voted the night before to recommend denial of the permit and add several additional conditions before a permit could be granted.

In an interview Monday, Krachun said he still will pursue a private, noncommercial shooting range, which requires no conditional use permit to operate on his agriculturally zoned 60-acre property.

While the advisory committee’s vote would not have bound the Board of Adjustment to deny or change the conditional use permit, it unanimously recommended a suite of additional conditions, including prohibiting the use of machine guns on the range.

“I lost before I even walked in there,” Krachun said. “They can’t just do whatever they want. They zoned the property as a conditional use gun range and then to say you can’t shoot a machine gun on the range, they’re stepping on the Second Amendment.”

He added that his decision to withdraw the application was in part based on his recent cancer diagnosis.

“I wasn’t doing it for the money. I don’t need the money. I can’t spend he money that I have in the rest of my life,” he said. “I was doing it to share the experience with people that can’t afford to buy a $30,000, $40,000 machine gun.”

Regardless of the outcome of his illness, Krachun said he’s done pursuing the conditional use permit for the shooting range, which he said is 75 percent complete.

Krachun had requested to open an appointment-only commercial shooting range that would use a pair of gravel pits on the property on Echo Bay Trail that includes Talmadge Lake.

More than 75 residents from the Echo Lake area attended Thursday’s advisory committee hearing, many of them speaking against the proposed shooting range.

Many of the speakers during the public comment portion of the hearing cited safety concerns for the adjacent residential developments, as well as the expected noise from an active shooting range that would have been permitted to operate seven days per week from one hour after sunrise to one hour after sunset.

Montana law explicitly exempts from public nuisance complaints the noise caused by shooting ranges operating during established hours, and Flathead County has no regulations on noise from firearms.

One of the conditions suggested by the board would have further limited the range's operational hours to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and kept it from being open on Sundays.

Krachun said he was open to some of those requests, including the restricted hours and the county’s requirements that he oil the gravel roads to abate dust and install vaulted toilets instead of portable ones.

“It could have been our way, but they wanted it their way, so now I’ll have it my way,” Krachun said. “If I want to stay open to 8 o’clock, I can. ... If they think they won, they might want to think twice about whether they did.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.