- June 15, 2025
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The last time Manatee County had an outdoor firing range for law enforcement, Jay Romine had just graduated from the police academy.
His career has since spanned 46 years.
Romine served 20 years as the chief of police for the Holmes Beach Police Department. For the past 12 years, he’s served as the director of the Law Enforcement Academy at Manatee Technical College.
Romine is not ready to retire just yet, but now that a new $7.01 million Law Enforcement Training Center is up and running off Taylor Road in Myakka City, he can retire in peace when the time comes.
“I had to see it through,” he said.
Romine was still chief of police when he proposed the training facility 18 years ago.
As the director of the academy, he started pushing hard for the center when the college’s indoor firing range at the campus on 34th Street West was shut down in 2014.
When small amounts of shrapnel started blowing back off the bullet traps to the firing line, the range was deemed too dangerous to keep in use and too expensive to refurbish, especially since that campus was no longer in use.
From then on, cadets had to travel to St. Petersburg to use an indoor firing range. Outdoor training didn’t require out-of-county travel, but it came with distractions that impeded the learning process.
The college had a driving pad next to its indoor range at the old campus. Romine likened it to a parking lot. It had been grandfathered in, but never met the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s standards for an official driving pad.
Romine said in its latter years, it also became the ingress and egress for Bayshore High School’s buses, so training would have to stop every time a bus passed. He described “the parking lot” as twice as long and half as wide as it needed to be.
“We made do, but it was a struggle,” Romine said. “Unless (an officer) gets into an accident and needs remedial training, they may go the rest of their career and never have any more vehicle operations training. That’s always stuck in my craw.”
The Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and the DeSoto Square Mall parking lot are among the other locations used for training.
Since March, cadets have been training at a 70-acre, state-of-the-art facility that features a 50-yard pistol range, 200-yard rifle range, 300-by-600-foot driving pad with adjustable lighting, two observation towers, a classroom and an armory room.
The facility is a partnership between the college and the Bradenton Police Department. Outside of the facility itself, there are two of everything.
Side-by-side storage units sit next to the driving pad. When opening the front door, the wall straight ahead is flanked with each institution’s emblem.
“This is kind of a shining example of working together to get this done,” Romine said. “That’s the only way it happened, and it’s not that way everywhere. We really do have a great relationship between the school and the agencies and all the agencies together. It’s been that way for years.”
In this case, the college had the funding, and the city of Bradenton had the land.
When Romine first presented his proposal 18 years ago, local officials loved it.
“The response we got was that it’s a great plan and there’s a real need for it; good luck finding the funding,” Romine recalled.
It would take over a decade, but in 2020, former Senate President Bill Galvano and former Rep. Tommy Gregory successfully led the Florida Legislature to appropriate $2 million to the training facility, and the Manatee County School Board agreed to fund the rest.
The price tag started at $4.7 million and ballooned to $7.01 million by 2024 because of increased labor and supply costs.
The over $7 million estimate didn’t include the land, and cuts had to be made.
There’s a little more of an echo inside the classroom because there aren’t as many acoustic panels lining the back wall. A pursuit track to go with the driving pad was cut entirely from the plans, and the shoot house is only half finished.
Acoustic panels and less expensive building materials were the barely noticeable cuts. The shoot house was a major cut, so when money was left over in the budget, the school district agreed to get the project started.
A shoot house simulates the experience of an officer entering a building, except that the handguns shoot paintballs instead of live rounds.
The shoot house currently has floors, walls and an overhead catwalk for instructors to monitor the cadets. It's still waiting on a roof, but it's usable. Romine pointed to the water on the floor and said a squeegee can push that out.
There’s also a $32,000 movable wall set-up that can transform the shoot house into a living room or classroom within a few minutes. Temporary partitions are being used for now. The walls will come out of storage after the roof is installed.
The donation came from the family of Dr. Lawrence Lieberman through the Bradenton Blue Foundation, which raises funds that go specifically toward the training, wellness and safety of BPD’s officers.
Captain Brian Thiers said the anticipated cost to finish the shoot house is about $150,000.
The foundation itself has committed $50,000 to the project, and it also received a $50,000 donation from Cox Chevrolet in honor of Steve Cox that’s earmarked for the shoot house.
The department is still seeking an additional $50,000.
“This type of training is real world scenario based,” Thiers said. “It makes our police officers and our law enforcement in Manatee County better at their job.”
BPD had already been using a training facility on the property because the city of Bradenton purchased the land for $756,500 in 1989. The overall parcel is 654 acres, but only 70 acres are dedicated to the training center and about half that is currently being used.
The old BPD range was in a nearby location among the 654 acres, and it came with an equally unique challenge as the college had to work around school buses.
According to Meredith Censullo, the department’s public information officer, the range could only be accessed through a rancher’s property, which included opening and shutting several gates to ensure none of the cows got out.
The old range had a shoot house at one point, but never electricity or bathrooms. Censullo also noted a “pieced-together obstacle course” that was primarily used for Special Weapons and Tactics tryouts and training.
The new facility has room to grow, and while an obstacle course and pursuit track could make excellent additions in the future, Romine and Thiers are more than satisfied with the outcome.
