The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Atlanta Field Office is in agreement to fund the Hall County Sheriff’s Office up to $1.7 million to build a new training center.
“About three months ago,” said Sheriff Gerald Couch to the Hall County Board of Commissioners at Monday’s work session. “I was contacted by the Atlanta Field Office of the FBI wanting to know if they could come and do a pistol qualification at our range.”
According to Couch, the FBI has been qualifying at East Point Police Department for the last 30 years, but ‘evidently there are some problems with that range’ so the FBI has been exploring other options as to where they can host their training sessions.
For Hall County to fit that bill, they will have to replace their target system which Couch says is in a constant state of disrepair.
The FBI was originally willing to invest around $90,000 for a new target system.
“We continued to have meetings to see what would suit them for the training center and what would suit us for the sheriff’s office,” Couch said. “At the end of the day, we were looking at building a new training center adjacent to our current center.”
That’s when the FBI upped their funding from $90,000 for a new target system to $1.7 million for a whole new training center. The Hall County Board of Commissioners consented to this agreement on Monday.
The new training center will have a covered 30-lane firing range that will meet the FBI specifications as well as a 20-lane firing range adjacent to that. It will have a 1,000-yard sniper course, four classrooms and will have a total area of around 10,000 square feet.
The current training center is around 5,000 square feet and Couch says the Hall County Sheriff’s Office has ‘pretty much outgrown’ the 10-year-old facility.
“The parking lot is not big enough to handle all the vehicles when we have a training sessions and the facility is just overwhelmed.”
The plan is to keep the physical fitness program at the current training center as the sheriff’s office already has an obstacle course built in there. So all that equipment will stay at the one-classroom Willard Baxter Firearms and Training Complex off Allen Creek Road.
Everything else will move to the new training center as Couch wants to have move training in-house to save costs as well as bringing in instructors at a greatly reduced cost. All things that will only be possible with a new facility.
The new training center is only intended for use by the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office and the Hall County Sheriff’s Office. Any other federal agencies looking to use the facility for qualifications will have to receive approval from the sheriff’s office.
The FBI currently qualifies quarterly, the sheriff’s office does it three times a year and the SWAT team requires training every month so the new center is expected to receive ample use throughout the year.
