The Sabbath, be it Saturday or Sunday, is supposed to be a day of peace and rest. Not so for the citizens of the Town of Thompson. The Monticello Motor Club (MMC), with the express permission of our fat-pocketed politicians, has taken that privilege away from us.

The amount of noise generated by that motor club, last Saturday, was unlivable. You could not be in your house or outside of your house without hearing what sounded like a constant loud siren going off for a good part of the day. It was so annoying that the only way of escaping it was to leave your home and go someplace else. If you were inside, you needed the TV or something else playing very loudly to drown out the harassing noise.

We, who live here attended the planning board meetings to ask that this club be forced to erect sound walls to, at least, mitigate the noise that they would be producing. We asked that this be a condition of their expansion plan. Our politicians, many of whom gain from the motor club, and our former town supervisor (who now works at the MMC) made sure that those sound walls would never happen. They claimed that they were not necessary. When I spoke to one of the owners or main officers of the MMC and asked why they were not more considerate to the people who live here and erect those walls, he answered me very honestly, “We don’t have to.”

Our property values are low, and for anyone whose property is within hearing range of the motor club, the value has decreased even more. The MMC is in the process of building homes in a development named “Serenity Gardens.” In a newspaper article about that development, it stated that those homes would be sound proofed. If it was not necessary to protect our homes from the noise, then where do they get the audacity to soundproof theirs? Something must be done about not allowing this motor club to run without protecting the people who live here from the harm that they cause.

Richard Chiger

Monticello, NY