Who we are

We are your fellow Woodstock residents in multiple Zoning districts, a mile and more out of the Town Center. For the past five years, we have entirely lost the ability to have a normal life in our homes from April to October, because of the new loud outdoor amplification by a few commercial music venues.  

We have lived and raised children and worked and volunteered in Woodstock, some of us for up to five decades, as nurses, homemakers, artists, businesspeople, teachers, engineers, art patrons and – yes- musicians and outdoor-events planners. 

For daring to protest against the catastrophic noise invasion of our homes by loud outdoor commercial programming, we have been told on social media that we are “anti-music”, “anti-Woodstock” and don’t belong in our own town.

Yet, for four years, WE have been the ones fighting to truly protect music and the arts. Our art community cannot survive unless every Woodstocker retains the freedom to choose THEIR own music, THEIR own art, THEIR own creative and restful space, THEIR own beloved venues, and to control WHEN and WHERE to enjoy them. Once this freedom is taken away by Ordinance and handed over to specific commercial interests, it will be lost forever.

Why we must go public, reluctantly

After years of helplessness, we now know that the loss of our homes is the direct result of misuse of Emergency permits and unaccountable Zoning delinquencies.

We have been adamant that this cannot be a partisan political issue, as it affects everyone. We tried to “trust the process”, only to find that the demands by venues and loud-concert fans to change our laws - at no cost to themselves - had been pre-ordained as a principle, while the victims were given only one option:

Either endure overwhelming noise forever, or agree to join a Town-ordered Task Force to give cover of bipartisanship to their loss, hoping for a token relief from the nightmare set to invade their lives permanently. Either way, their homes and rights are lost.

Under this imposed pressure of “political inevitability”, the victims representatives, chosen by the supervisor, have already given away two years of their lives to this Task Force, with the unjust and dispiriting task of surrendering not only their own homes and rights, but those of others. Because of the closed-doors process of their work, they could not involve others in determining the end result. In turn, the present website was developed outside of their work and does not commit their voices. Instead, it wishes to speak of the impact of the end result.

Unable to understand how our laws failed us so completely after decades of protecting Woodstock’s precious quality of life for all, we were forced, for the first time in our Woodstock lives, to resort to Freedom of Information (FOIL) requests.

The noise we had endured since 2020 was already indefensible in itself. What we discovered from our FOIL queries is of a different nature altogether. Permits abused or non-existent; production of fake documents; executive “trial period” actions unenforceable by the Police; multi-year law-breaking by venues; obstructive official communications, purposefully blurring Zoning delinquency and Ordinance infractions; interpretive decisions at odds with specific Zoning provisions and five decades of Town history; and more.

This cannot be Woodstock. It is so wrong, and we have had ENOUGH.

We demand accountability and a return to due process, not just for us but for all residents, who are about to lose their rights and not find out until it is too late.

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