According to district mayor Mantas Varaška, the state-assigned facility will be adapted for active recreation – residents will be able to train shooting and martial arts skills here, and there will also be a park for roller skates, skateboards, and scooters.
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“We are planning a multifunctional facility – underground, with a shooting range, a mass shelter or long-term hideout, along with sports disciplines – that is combat self-defense, judo, Greco-Roman wrestling, and similar,” M. Varaška told BNS.
“It would be not only a shelter but also a place for daily activities – 5–6 sports clubs and also an underground shooting range, meeting the goal of the State Defense Council that within a few years at least 0.5 million people in Lithuania should have shooting skills with small-caliber weapons,” the mayor added.
According to him, setting up such an underground facility would cost about 2.5–3 million euros.
This week, the government allowed the state-owned railway infrastructure company “LTG Infra” to transfer the management of a 1,200 square meter cargo platform to Kazlų Rūda municipality.
The platform has not been used since 2015, when during the development of the European railway gauge “Rail Baltica” project it was separated from the railway by a soundproof wall.
According to M. Varaška, the platform no longer exists, only the plot remains: “The ramp exists only on paper, but in reality it is just an old wall of hewn stones that once separated the former structure from the railway gauge. That gauge has long been dismantled.”
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According to the mayor, the exact project value and implementation date are not yet clear, as the government has not approved the requirements for such facilities.
“Everything now depends on whether the government will make progress in these months, at least this half-year, regarding the coordination meeting held at the Presidency in June about typical requirements – approved requirements for such mass shelters and shooting ranges. So that we can manage to use regional development funds from this period, 2021–2027 (EU funding – BNS), because there are leftovers,” M. Varaška said.
As BNS wrote, this April, to strengthen the country’s residents’ preparedness for total defense, the Lithuanian Association of Municipalities (LSA) proposed creating universal-purpose underground infrastructure that could be used both in peacetime and in preparation for crisis situations.
LSA urged the government, the Ministries of National Defense, Interior, Environment Protection, and Finance to consider the concept of underground facilities, integrating shooting ranges, shelters, hideouts, skills training necessary for total defense, sports and leisure, parking, and other spaces.
It is noted that such multifunctional facilities, where leisure infrastructure is combined with security and civil protection needs, have been operating in Finland for several years.
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