HELENA — Every two years, Montana lawmakers consider millions of dollars in spending for construction and maintenance on state-owned buildings. This year, Montana’s attorney general is asking them to fund improvements at the Helena Valley campus where the state’s law enforcement officers get their training.
Almost 80 cadets are currently going through the Law Enforcement Officer Basic training program at the Montana Law Enforcement Academy. Administrators say, when the weather is as cold as this, the campus has some challenges.
(Watch the video for a look at the issues leaders want funding to address at MLEA.)
“It's 20 or 25 below this morning, and normally they'd be out shooting right now,” said Attorney General Austin Knudsen. “Well, if you're a new shooter, you're not learning the basics of firearm safety and firearm function when it’s that cold out – you're just thinking about staying alive. So it's not an ideal situation when you're trying to train the best law enforcement cadets we can from Montana.”
Last week, Knudsen testified before a legislative budget committee, asking them to support $10 million in funding to build an indoor shooting range for training at MLEA. The money is currently included in House Bill 5, a major long-range funding bill.
Currently, MLEA rents an outdoor shooting range from the city of Helena. It’s located near the Helena Regional Airport, several miles away.
“We lose a lot of time in a day just driving to it back and forth – multiple vehicles to take 20 or 30 cadets at a time,” Knudsen said.
Knudsen says firearm training is one of the most important things law enforcement officers do, and having an indoor range on campus would go a long way to improving that training.
“We can give classroom instruction, we can go right across the road over here to the indoor range, apply what we've just learned – and we can do it incrementally over the whole 12 weeks, not try to firehose these cadets in five days condensed on an outdoor range,” he said.
HB 5 also includes $300,000 for air conditioning installation at the MLEA campus. The Montana Department of Justice is also requesting $350,000 each of the next two years in House Bill 2, the main state budget bill, to fund additional maintenance there.
Many of the MLEA buildings date back around 100 years, when the campus was the Montana State Vocational School for Girls, a reform school. Knudsen says it’s taking more effort to keep the aging facilities up.
“When the HVAC was updated about 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it was lowest bidder,” he said. “A lot of that stuff is failing. We can't get parts for it. We do have an air conditioning request for one of the old buildings with a classroom in it, that in the summertime, that classroom is upstairs, and you'll get 90 degrees in that classroom. We can't use it; cadets aren’t learning in that environment.”
In several of the buildings’ basements, administrators have set up rooms for “scenario training,” where cadets practice real-life situations that a law enforcement officer might face. One is set up to look like a bar, another a hotel room, and another a casino. But Knudsen said the space really isn’t conducive to training.
“It's tough; you know, you get anybody who's much taller than me, they're going to hit their heads,” he said. “We're constantly coming down here and finding concrete and plaster that's falling off the walls. In the springtime, we have multiple sump pumps running because it's a really high water table up here.”
MLEA does have some modern buildings, including a brand-new scenario training facility dedicated in December. This group of cadets will be the first to use it in their training. The building includes an indoor “street” where administrators can bring in cars for specific scenarios. MLEA executive director Joel Wendland said cadets will be practicing traffic stops there this week.
“Ideally, that'll mean we're not using this basement space as much,” Knudsen said. “But look, we've got a record-size class right now. The classes keep getting bigger; there's more and more demand for the Law Enforcement Academy. So we probably are in a situation where we're still going to be using some of the space down here.”
The current group of cadets began their training two weeks ago. They’re scheduled to graduate in mid-April.
