The New York City Department of Design and Construction is moving forward with a $273 million project to overhaul an NYPD training facility and shooting range on City Island, a notice published Thursday in the City Record shows.
The police department says the largely enclosed new facility will reduce the noise from the shooting range, also used by bomb squad trainees and Correction officers, which has been active since 1960 — and has plagued City Island residents for as long, as well as people in nearby Pelham Bay and Country Club.
The NYPD has made several attempts over the years to address the sound issue, including an aborted plan for an indoor facility across the East River in College Point and a concept to install temporary baffling that never came to fruition.
According to a presentation that officials from the NYPD and the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) gave during a November meeting led by the 45th Precinct Community Council Rodman’s Neck Monitoring Committee the project will construct a new indoor shooting range with 150 firing points operating around the clock and also remove three of six outdoor ranges to clear space. Construction is set to begin this summer and is tentatively scheduled to be completed in late 2029, according to a NYPD spokesperson.
The spokesperson, who said that the facility would result in major reduction of noise levels but did not respond to a question about what the improved noise decibel levels were expected to be, added that it will also include a new classroom complex, mess hall, bathroom, locker room facilities, storage facilities and a parking area.
“This is going to really put the department in the 21st century. The training is going to be top class training there,” Amr Eldin, director of the NYPD’s capital construction unit, said at the meeting, adding that “it’s going to have almost zero to no noise at all.”
A DDC outreach coordinator told the Bronx Times last year that the “current worst noise level recording at City Island from the gun range was just over 70 decibels, or about as loud as traffic or a vacuum cleaner, while the “targeted level emanating from [the] indoor range is 0-5 dba.”
The agency awarded the construction contract to Syosset-based Liro Program and Construction Management, which has spearheaded more than a dozen NYPD capital projects including the 40th precinct building erected in Mott Haven in November. They were selected through a Construction Management-Build contract, an accelerated request-for-proposal process that “eliminates lengthy procurement processes, a process DDC says “allows construction to begin earlier” and “ensures critical early collaboration between the designer and the builder.”
In 2017, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $275 million injection to update the training facility. Jimmy Vacca, the former City Council member for the district that includes Rodman’s Neck, called this week’s milestone “very good news” but lamented that the project should have begun “five years ago, six years ago.”
The gun range, Vacca said, is loud enough that “you’ll be having lunch or dinner in your house, and you will hear cracking noises. You will hear very loud noises going right through your house, and it happens all hours of the day.”
Bringing the range inside, he continued, “is something that will have a lasting impact on City Island. It will have a lasting impact on the police officers who use this facility. It is an old facility that needs modernization, and this modernization has been long overdue for that police firing range, and I’m just so glad that it’s finally going to happen.”
That was the feeling of Barbara Dolensek, who has lived on City Island since 1976. “We know when there are classes going on, because there’s like, a week long, five days in a row, sometimes for two weeks of shooting that goes on all day long.” said Dolensek. “I’ve been waiting for over 35 years for this.”
The noises from the range have only become louder over time, Dolensek said.
“It wasn’t bad when we first moved here in the ’70s. It really started in the late ’80s when they started using more louder guns, bigger guns, and insisting that everybody start to train more regularly,” she recalled, describing the noise as “really awful and quite noticeable” by 1990.
“I mean, I think what they do is incredibly important there, and I’m glad that they do have more classes where they’re teaching these young cops how to shoot.”
Multiple residents on City Island told THE CITY Thursday evening that they hear gunshots from Rodman’s Neck at various hours throughout the week.
The NYPD firing range is on Rodman Neck accross the water from City Island, March 13, 2025. Credit: Jonathan Custodio/THE CITY
While walking her dog Marigold on City Island Avenue, Joan Mamara told THE CITY that while she supports any plan to reduce the noise at Rodman’s Neck, she doesn’t pay it much mind.
“I know it bothers a lot of people, and for some reason it doesn’t bother me because to me it sounds like fireworks and I love fireworks,” said Mamara. “But I’m not the norm.”
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