welcome to spotlight on maplewood i'm your host and city manager chuckle spotlight is here to inform you about city news and events highlighting people and programs to help you understand your city government and the services we provide to manton and as retired and is no longer with the city we will want to thank jim for his great work he was with the city for over four years and he was the right guy at the right time for our city  personally want to thank him for being a great friend but also the great things he did for the city the city council's hired me now is the new city manager of course i've been with the city for many years actually started back in one nine hundred eighty three so but most recently i served as the assistant city manager and i'm pleased now to serve as the citizens of maplewood as the city manager and also the host of spotlight spotlight will be returning to a regular schedule of programming and will provide some valuable information for the city and the northeast suburbs some recent news for us is that we've hired a new assistant city manager and that's melinda coleman and melinda also returns to maplewood after seven years being away the most recent for as the city manager unorthodox melinda was with maplewood as the community development director and assistant city manager from one nine hundred ninety four to two thousand and six that's when she left and went to work for target corp she has an extensive background in commute development activities as well as city management i see her role as being extensively involved in the economic development and business expansion areas for the city and also in developing a housing replacement program for city will cover that in a future spotlight i also want to talk  about briefly a new member of our staff and that's our new police chief paul schnell paul comes to us from the city of hastings he'd been chief there for about three years you'll probably recognize paul from his work prior to his work  hastings when he served with the face kind of as the as the st paul police department he was their public information officer in st paul for many many years and so when issues arose there he was the spokesperson paul brings many new ideas for continuing the great efforts of our maplewood police department we've got a tremendous wealth of fine officers and we're planning some future shows with chief now one last thing i want to mention the highway thirty six work is nearing completion the closure of is planned to end on august thirty first it's right on schedule we anticipate that will happen but the work does continue for the entire remainder of the year so we ask everybody to be safe through that corridor but you'll love those great improvements in the area for today's spotlight we're going to take a look at an open house held by the st paul police department not a lot of our residents ninety nine year lease so they've been using that facility for more than thirty five years it's a very valuable training center used not only by st paul but maplewood police and other area agencies  their training over the years the land around the gun ranges been developed and now the range has a lot of close neighbors the city the county the police departments were trying to take an active role ensuring the safety of the range and it neighbors the issue of noise pollution that's come up and it's been studied the st paul police departments working on adding some concrete walls kind of around those shooting stations just a lesson that noise and that impact on our neighborhood we will give you an update on that work on an upcoming spotlight the open house you're going to see was held by the st paul police department to invite neighbors to visit the facility and inform them about the safety and noise reduction efforts let's take a look at the events of that day today we're having an open house invited some neighbors from around the in the neighborhood neighbors from the community to come out and check out the facility educate them a little b and what exactly we do down here and just step provide any information and hopefully answer questions that they may have about what we actually do down here when i was there during i'm a police officer at the st paul police department sang in the training unit currently work as a full time range instructor here at the outdoor range but you see behind me is our village inside the village we do our force on force training where we set up scenarios for the officers to run  decision based scenario tree gives us a lot of opportunities to to put the officers in real world situations to keep them trained having our officers well prepared and with the facility that we have out here at the range it definitely does give us that opportunity to get our officers well prepared for situations that they'll be faced with they can drive vehicles in here in such set up traffic stops different vehicles get some different buildings that are half buildings where you can set up ambush type scenarios we do not do any live fire training in this in this section of the range this is all just training force on force scenario based training on any given day will our class sizes all vary from twelve to twenty four here at st paul gold then surely if we do a full training cycle of everyone in the department it's going to be around six hundred six hundred ten depending on where we're at with our authorized strength throughout our middle range range to kind of looking up arrange back to the hundred yard marker where the benches are at one hundred yards that is the furthest that we can shoot  range one of the things that that is in the works are we are going to enclose that those benches that bench area right there with the three sided enclosure to assist with  under a second depend on whatever course of fire we're doing so we can handle fourteen shooters at a time and we can come back to twenty five yards on this range will shoot pistol hi i'm officer jason ruger with the same paul police department i'm currently assigned to our firearms range as a full time firearms instructor also i am one of our snipers on the same paul police swat team and what i have in my hand is my sniper rifle that is assigned to me so remington seven hundred so three zero eight or seven six two by five one this round in particular and rifle we end up shooting typically the first tuesday of each month and it's last usually around twelve o'clock to one thirty pm on an hour and a half shoot there's eight officers that are currently assigned as snipers we shoot around twelve to sixteen rounds during that hour and a half what we tend to do is we'll shoot a cold war shot first i mean before any rounds have gone through the rifle because we'll shoot that one cold war shot and then we'll shoot three follow up shots on our target and we wait typically about twenty minutes to fire the second cold war shot and then we'll fire three more rounds and then another twenty minutes before we shoot the third corps cold war shot and another three rounds reason why we do this is we want the rifle to cool down and if we ever have to use this we want to know exactly where round is going right when we pull the trigger for the first time so that's why last usually about an hour to an hour and a half i have been deployed as a sniper before on the team we set up on barricades and what we end up doing is this is usually used more snipers are used to gather intelligence this weapon my weapon and i can tell you no other safe runner team has actually had to use it in the line of duty yet we train for what could happen tension that could happen and typically what we'll do is gather intelligence for o swat officers that are out in the perimeter wherever they may be and let let them know if we see movement what we're seeing going on in the situation but that's why we also shoot once a month both in case that situation happens where we would have to use this we want to be accurate and make sure that if there are it arises we train for it but we hope that we do not have to use it today we have an open house at the outdoor range and we're inviting the public to come in see what we do see what the range is about explain all the different agencies that we train maplewood p d was our range st paul p maplewood primarily are the ones that use a range we also have several federal law enforcement agencies that use this range primary ones a t f the we have federal probation i r s and so we just want the public to see what we have all here what we're about the range set up and to be a service to your citizens and to st paul what we have here is range one and you can see that i was not a senior government that was not involved course and the paperwork that went to the original lease they got signed repeatedly says practice and i'm right so this was supposed to be a practice handgun range that would have been pretty cool some of the people in this room a little girl for fifteen or more years it's not just a handgun range anymore and so higher powered weapons which they have to use to be prepared for they live within the streets we've got but the result of that is we have people who are within two house when you turned into the driveway that's not two hundred feet from here so the reality is this has been here forever i was in the gulf when stuff expanded the noise that the range used to generate is not going to generates today for all the best reasons in the world instructor fire weapons in a classroom gun accidentally went off so i mean there are solutions around that so this is not as much protection as could be that they do a private range is clearly an accident could happen i know they think all all want our police to be ready to respond to any threats that could confront them and to be able to protect both themselves and obviously to protect and serve our citizens that's it for today's spotlight and maplewo will be back soon with studio guests and video segments for you thanks for watching i'm your host and city manager