Ocoee to get new training facility

When area police officers require extra training, they have two options: Use Ocoee’s small outdoor shooting range or go to Orlando to use the oftentimes crowded police training facility. All that will change for officers in West Orange and Lake counties once the city of Ocoee completes its new West Orange Regional Law Enforcement Training Center.

Officials hope to break ground on the 15,000-square-foot facility within the next year.

The project will cost $12 million; Chris McKinstry, assistant police chief for the Ocoee Police Department, said the town has received $2 million in funds from the state of Florida and $5 million from the federal level and the city will finance the remainder of the cost.

The facility has been in the planning stages for several years, McKinstry said. The city has received the construction plans, as well as a rendering of the building. The facility will be built at the corner of Fullers Cross Road and State Road 429.

The number of local departments reaching out has been extensive, McKinstry said. Seventeen chiefs of police in Orange and Lake counties have expressed an interest in wanting to be part of the project, as well as the sheriff’s offices in those two counties.

The facility in Orlando has an indoor shooting range, but it’s at capacity most of the time, making it difficult to get range time, McKinstry said.

“We anticipate this to be a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week space,” McKinstry said.

It will include a conference room, two large open spaces and two community classrooms, which can be used for various municipality programs, such as citizens police academies and teen academies.

“We have very limited space, and it will give us a change to branch out,” McKinstry said.

The facility also will hold 15 soundproof indoor lanes for firearms training, “so we can do qualifications a lot quicker than we can now,” he said. “Right now, we have a four- or five-lane range outdoors by the Public Works Utilities building off A.D. Mims Road. In inclement weather in the summer, it gets uncomfortable.”

The city of Ocoee hired a consultant in 2022 to evaluate an unsolicited proposal to construct the police training center with indoor and outdoor areas available for different skills development.