Complaints Reverberate Among Neighbors of Gun Range

John Ekberg and his wife, Sandra, moved from Orange County to a rambling, $400,000 hillside home in Pauma Valley five years ago, drawn by the region’s rural ambience and easygoing life style.

Heck, there was even a privately operated campground at the base of the their hill, less than a mile away.

Ah, life in the country.

But there are times, Ekberg says, when he thinks he’s moved into a war zone.

The 31-acre campground--Rancho Corrido, along the banks of the San Luis Rey River--features, among other amenities, a target range that’s open to the public for a $7 day-use fee that also gives gun users access to the swimming pool and other recreational offerings.

On weekends, Ekberg says, “we might as well be in the middle of Vietnam at the height of conflict.”

Some neighbors voice the same complaint.

“I think I’d rather live around an airport than this place,” said Ray Ensch, who lives near Ekberg on the same hillside that looks down on the campground and shooting range. “I wouldn’t have bought this place if I had known at the time the rifle range was down there.”

Ekberg has complained to the county noise-control office, but two different noise-monitoring sessions have shown the noise to be within legal limits.

And the manager of the campground is less than sympathetic:

“No matter what kind of business you’ve got, somebody’s always complaining about it,” Bruce Birch said. “I’ve been up to (Ekberg’s) driveway, and you can barely hear the shooting. It’s utterly absurd that someone’s complaining.”

The campground has been around for 20 years or more and is popular among youth groups and organized recreational-vehicle campers who travel in caravans from one site to another or gather for weekend outings. Many of them bring their pistols and rifles, then mosey over to the shooting range--little more than a football field-size sandbox--for recreational shooting.

Law enforcement officers are also said to use the range on occasion for practice or to qualify with their weapons.

The range is hardly sophisticated. Unlike some indoor ranges with individual shooting lanes and targets on pulleys, the Rancho Corrido setup offers picnic tables and a scattering of targets off in the distance--plastic milk cartons to wooden bowling pins to Reader’s Digest condensed books to more traditional paper targets on wooden sticks.

Hillside neighbors say the noise of gunfire has worsened in recent months, about the same time that new owners purchased the campground, and they insist that they’ve heard the sound of rapid, semiautomatic gunfire.

Birch insists that semiautomatics are not allowed at the range, and that a safety officer is on site during busy hours and has been instructed to remove any shooters with such weapons.

He also said that a 10- to 15-foot-high sand berm surrounding the range has effectively reduced the noise.

Full-time residents at the small park say they are not upset by the gunfire, especially since the berm was erected several months ago.

“It doesn’t bother us,” said Helen Dunn, who, with her husband, Don, has lived at the park for three years. “But then again, we’re not gripers.”

Several transient campers said they, too, were unbothered by the occasional crack of gunfire.

But others say the noise can get quite loud, especially on holiday weekends when 20 or more shooters are firing away at once.

“It sounded like World War III over Thanksgiving,” conceded one park employee.

While the berm may reduce the level of noise at ground level, it doesn’t help people like Ekberg, who has a direct line of sight to the shooters from his viewpoint halfway up the hillside, on Adams Drive across California 76 from the campground.

His complaints to the county, however, haven’t gone far. Ray Sacco, assistant noise-control officer, set up monitoring equipment at Ekberg’s house on two different weekends, and the results both times showed the noise to be within the county’s legal limit of 50 decibels, averaged out over an hour.

A decibel rating of 50, Sacco said, is about the equivalent of the noise heard “in a semi-urban neighborhood.”

Some individual gunshots might have been louder than 50 decibels, Sacco said, but it’s the average sound level over an hour that counts.

Sacco acknowledged, however, that the equipment used by the county is not calibrated to read the quick rise and decay of a gunshot report. The issue is one of how to best read the peak level of a noise, “and there’s no consensus or standard, even among the experts, on how to measure the maximum peak of an impact noise,” such as gunfire, he said.

Ekberg’s other alternative, Sacco said, is to seek redress by citing a section in the county’s noise-abatement and control ordinance that prohibits any “disturbing, excessive or offensive noise,” regardless of its decibel output, if it causes “discomfort or annoyance to reasonable persons of normal sensitivity residing in the area.”

Such an allegation would be forwarded first to Sacco, then to his boss for a ruling, which could then be appealed by either side to the 10-member county Noise Control Hearing Board.

Sacco says he hasn’t yet encountered a case where that general-nuisance section of law has been implemented, and he’s not sure whether Ekberg’s complaint would qualify.

“There would have to be significant evidence of it affecting a number of people,” he said.

Ekberg is hoping he will provide that kind of evidence when he turns in petitions with the names of more than 35 neighbors who are also unhappy with the noise. He has yet to forward the petitions to the county.

Birch, the range manager, says he’s unmoved by such a showing.

“He’s bound to get a few people who will say, ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t like the noise.’ But nobody besides him (Ekberg) has ever complained to us directly.”

Meanwhile, Ekberg, a financial consultant, has his house up for sale on a speculative basis, and is asking $550,000 for it. He says he hopes prospective buyers won’t view the home on a weekend when the range is full of shooters.

“I’ve had people come out to look at the house, and they hear the shooting. They don’t come back.”

Answers Birch: “He can’t sell his house, and he’s blaming it on the range. I think if he advertised that his home is near a shooting range, he’d attract more buyers because a lot of people would like to live conveniently close to a shooting range.”