Shoot! City nabs junior skeet club.

On the last day of Sacramento’s record-setting 11-day heat wave last month, most of the golfers at the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex at Fulton Avenue and the Capital City Freeway were sheltered in the air-conditioned clubhouse, away from the blistering heat.

But at the Sacramento Trapshooting Club facility next door, about a dozen kids were unfazed by the stifling outdoor air as they stood resolutely on the shooting range and fired shotguns at clay pigeons sailing through the air.

Abby Barnes and Stephen Carey, both 12, were among the shooters putting in practice time in anticipation of the club youth group’s trip to the 107th annual Grand American World Trapshooting Championships in early August. In June, the youngsters’ exceptional shooting performance at the California championships qualified them for the national event, held this year in Illinois.

The club’s popular junior-shooters program has developed national champions. “We have some 50 kids involved on a regular basis,” said Jim Elliott, the club’s president. “We’re taking 15 kids back to Illinois to represent our club and the state, and it’s all paid for by donations from members, other individuals and groups.”

Barnes will be making her second trip to the nationals and looks to improve her finish this year. She is the only girl on her five-shooter squad. “I didn’t do as well as I hoped last year, but I had a lot of fun doing it,” she said. Carey, who has been shooting for two years, also qualified for the trip for a second year. His squad has two girls and three boys.

The national championships will be held at a state-of-the-art shooting facility in Sparta, Ill., developed by the state over four years to become what Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich calls “the premiere shooting facility in the nation.” About 150,000 people from across the country—including the 15 Sacramento kids—are expected to attend the August championships.

But shortly after the youth group returns to Sacramento, its own facility will be shuttered by the city. Last month, the city moved to evict the club from the 20-acre site that’s been its home for 80 years so it can rezone the property from parkland to commercial use and lease it to a car dealership.

The club intends to put up a fight. Elliott charges that the city is reneging on a promise to extend the lease after the club made more than $200,000 in improvements to the property over the past five years. Some of those improvements were made to the large clubhouse, which overlooks the grassy shooting range. The high-ceiling, open-beam clubhouse interior, which includes a full kitchen and snack-bar area, reeks of history. The wood-paneled walls are lined with photos and awards of past club champions.

Numerous city officials contacted by SN&R declined to comment on the dispute while the eviction litigation is pending.

But the letter of the law, if not the spirit, appears to be on the side of City Hall, according to Abby Barnes’ dad, Alan Barnes, a local attorney who has been scouring law books trying to find a way to save the club’s facility. Alan said that California state law usually prohibits cities from converting public park land to private commercial use. But a small number of cities—including Sacramento—that were designated as charter cities at their inception are exempt. Moreover, Alan said, since the city’s promise to extend the lease was verbal, not written, it will be nearly impossible to hold the city to it. Alan contends that the city also did not follow through on a promise to provide the club help in relocating.

Jim Rinehart, division manager for Sacramento’s Economic Development Department, confirmed that the plan to convert the property is proceeding. He defended the city’s decision to transform the property to what he called a “higher and better use.”

“The policy decision by the elected officials was this would be a better benefit to the citizens of Sacramento,” he said. “I just think that the trapshoot club, as decent as the people that I’ve dealt with are—and they are good, decent human beings—just wouldn’t recognize for months and months and months that the landlord has the right to do this.”

The car dealership, Rinehart noted, will generate more than the $7,000 in annual rent that the nonprofit club pays. “The city has a right to have those lessees that they want, and in this case [the car dealership] will pay an enormous—many, many hundreds of times more rent than the trapshoot club, and that benefits our citizens. It goes into the general fund.”

Club members counter that the bottom line shouldn’t be the only consideration. That logic, they argue, could lead to a justification for converting all park land to commercial use. The city, they noted, already has proposed to spend millions in public funds to subsidize a new arena for the Sacramento Kings.

While the city’s Summer 2006 Recreation & Community Programs guide offers softball, bocce courts, a skate park, community swimming pools, equestrian trails and dog parks, trapshooting is off the menu. That’s a shame, Elliott said, because the sport grows in popularity each year.

“In 2006, the [California State Scholastic Trapshooting Program] grew to 600 kids at 20 different clubs, with 307 attending the California state championship,” said Elliott, who’s also the director of that statewide organization, which recruits and develops youngsters who show an interest in shooting.

This year, the trapshooting team at Woodcreek High School in Roseville became the first high-school team in California to participate in the statewide program.

“Once the high schools became involved in Tennessee, their program went from the size of California’s to over 2,000 in two years,” Elliott said, adding that it is also considered a proving ground for Olympic shooters.

Asked if she had Olympic ambitions, Abby Barnes was reserved. “I really don’t know what will happen in the future,” she said. But then she described a conversation she overheard a while back, and the memory seemed to get her thinking. “I was shooting bunker trap, which is where it’s Olympic style, when a friend of the Olympic coach who was watching me walked up to my dad and said, ‘You know, the women’s Olympic team is wide open.’”