The local headlines are bleeding heart stories about "tradition" and "community heritage." They frame the federal lawsuit filed by the Penticton Shooting Sports Association (PSSA) against the City of Penticton as a David versus Goliath battle. They want you to believe a big, bad municipality is crushing a harmless hobbyist group for no reason.
They are wrong.
The lawsuit over the eviction from Campbell Mountain isn't a story about government overreach. It is a story about the inevitable collision between 19th-century land use and 21st-century urban reality. The "lazy consensus" suggests that because a club has been there for decades, it has a moral right to stay forever. That is a fantasy. In the world of municipal growth and liability, "we were here first" is the weakest argument in the room.
The Myth of the Perpetual Lease
Most people looking at this case see a contract dispute. They see a club that held a lease since 1966 and think that longevity equals permanency. It doesn't.
Leases on public land are not deeds of ownership. They are temporary permissions. The PSSA is acting like a tenant who refuses to leave an apartment after the building has been condemned for redevelopment, then sues the landlord for "emotional distress."
The city issued a termination notice because the risk profile has changed. In 1966, Penticton’s periphery was a quiet backwater. Today, the urban interface is tighter, environmental regulations are stricter, and the cost of maintaining a lead-contaminated site on public land is a ticking financial time bomb. The city isn't being "mean." It is being fiduciary.
Lead is the Silent Dealbreaker
The media ignores the elephant in the room: environmental remediation. Every year a shooting range operates, the soil becomes a concentrated deposit of heavy metals.
If you own a private piece of land and want to fill it with lead, that’s your legal headache. But when that land is owned by the city—meaning it is owned by the taxpayers—the liability belongs to everyone. The longer the PSSA stays, the higher the eventual cleanup bill grows.
The club argues they have a plan for "stewardship." History shows that small, non-profit clubs rarely have the $500,000 to $2,000,000 required for full-scale soil reclamation once the gates finally lock. By fighting the eviction, the PSSA is essentially asking the public to subsidize their environmental footprint for another decade. That isn't sportsmanship. It’s a transfer of debt.
The Safety Fallacy
The "People Also Ask" section of this debate usually centers on whether the range is "safe."
This is the wrong question.
A range can be perfectly safe in terms of ballistics—meaning no stray bullets hit hikers—while being a total disaster in terms of land-use compatibility. Modern cities require "highest and best use" for public land. Is a restricted-access shooting range the highest and best use for a mountain-side property adjacent to a growing residential and recreational corridor?
Hardly.
Recreational trends have shifted. The demand for hiking trails, mountain biking paths, and multi-use green space outweighs the utility of a fenced-off zone where only a few hundred members can go. The city isn't "targeting" gun owners; they are responding to the market demand of their entire population rather than a specific interest group.
The Federal Lawsuit Strategy is a Desperation Move
Filing in federal court is a classic "delay and pray" tactic. By framing this as a breach of contract or a violation of rights, the PSSA hopes to drag the process out through years of discovery and motions.
I’ve seen this play out in dozens of municipal disputes. The goal isn't necessarily to win—it’s to make the eviction so expensive and legally tedious that the city settles for a 10-year extension just to make the headache go away.
But this backfires. When a group sues the hand that feeds them (the municipality providing the land), they incinerate any remaining political goodwill. They move from being "neighbors with a hobby" to "litigious adversaries." This lawsuit effectively kills any chance of the city helping the club find a new, more appropriate location. You don’t help your tenant find a new house while they’re suing you for the one they’re currently occupying.
The Professional Reality of Urban Growth
If you want to run a shooting club in 2026, you need to own the dirt.
The era of "sweetheart deals" on crown land or municipal outskirts is over. Real estate is too valuable. Insurance premiums are too high. Noise bylaws are too restrictive. The PSSA’s failure wasn't a lack of passion; it was a lack of foresight. They failed to build a capital reserve to purchase private land over the last fifty years, betting instead on the city's eternal patience.
Patience ran out.
The status quo says we should preserve these institutions at all costs because they represent "heritage." I say heritage that requires a public subsidy of risk and land is just a hobby on life support.
Stop crying about the "death of tradition." Start looking at the map. Penticton is growing up, and growing up means moving the noisy, high-liability activities away from the urban core. This isn't a tragedy. It’s a renovation.
The PSSA might win a few months in court, but they’ve already lost the city. Pack the bags. Clean the soil. Move on.
