Indoor Small Arms Range & Training Center

Spokane County, WA

The first shared Public Safety Training Facility operated by a Local Government Law Enforcement Agency, partially funded and shared with the US Air Force.

SIZE 76,400 SF / COMPLETION 2023 / COST $45M

The new indoor small arms range and training center provides the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) with a facility for administrative, conference, and training operations as well as a regional indoor small arms training range. SCSO shares the range training portions of the facility with US Air Force (USAF) personnel. It replaces existing accommodations, provides additional training facilities, and replaces the USAF’s existing outdoor firing range at Fairchild Air Force Base.

The SCSO compound has an operations/training building (including fully tactical indoor firing range), future emergency vehicle driver training course, exterior covered simunitions shoot house facility, helicopter rescue training tower, on-grade helicopter landing pad, K-9 training field, and associated supporting site features.

The primary building on site houses SCSO operations spaces, instructor offices, training classrooms/conference rooms, simulator space and associated storage spaces to support these functions. The other main component to the primary building is a 21-lane, indoor small arms range and accompanied training, instructor, utility, and storage spaces. This portion of the building is a shared space between the SCSO and the USAF and the shared range has special access requirements to enter. This area was built to US government Combat Arms Training and Maintenance (CATM) facility requirements which allows USAF personnel to train at this range. As the range is to be used by the US AirForce it was designed in accordance with Unified Facility Criteria (UFC) 4-179 Small Arms Range which was co-authored by Clark Nexsen the Public Safety team.

Additionally, a future 14-lane indoor, firing range addition is located in this design and will be fully designed and constructed in the future. Classroom spaces as part of this design will account for a surge to 35 students in each of the two range classrooms.

A future ¼-mile asphalt paved multi-lane PIT (Pursuit Intervention Technique) course has been designed for construction on county owned property, adjacent to the Training Academy. The PIT course & its return road has been designed with adequate “run off areas” to facilitate pursuit training.

An exterior simunitions shoot house was erected on a concrete pad and is covered by a Pre-engineered Metal Building (PEMB) frame, roof, and relocatable training walls. Shoot house construction was appropriate for the planned training types and was arranged to create spaces simulating residential/light commercial/school buildings for SCSO staff to train within using simulated munitions (simunitions) in lieu of live rounds. A catwalk assembly is provided above the shoot house for instructors to observe training operations. Under the PEMB cover, there is also an after-action review area with bleachers and display monitor for video playback and a separate CMU enclosure with a breaching frame.

The training tower has both a rappelling area and helicopter chassis with operable winch for aerial rescue training.

Supporting site features include an emergency vehicle fueling island, dumpster pad with enclosure, necessary drive aisles to the various site features, parking, landscaping and pedestrian walks.