To the “Blue Ribbon” people suing Moab for trying to pass extremely mild and belated UTV noise restrictions . . . and to your friends living 240 miles away from here who insist on subverting local democracy by dictating laws to us like this was still the British Empire.
UTV Noise is 100% completely incompatible with Moab families’ biological needs. No possible compromise can exist between your desire to impose industrial pollution onto a community and our own needs to rest, relax, enjoy our lives and partners, and play with our kids and pets in our yards. No community on this planet would tolerate it.
We’ve been trained to subordinate our needs to serve tourists. But we are finally growing a spine. Because the tourists you invite over here are so arrogant, abusive, and obviously guilty of harassing us “for fun” that they cannot be forgiven. We don’t need their money.
No possible compromise will get us to accept that the rights of maybe a dozen and a half UTV rental owners are more important than our love for our families. UTV noise is home invasion. You can hang four layers of drywall on your bedroom and you’ll still hear UTV noise through it.
You are worse than the cocaine and meth dealers. They mostly only damage their customers. We passed laws to make their businesses illegal and everyone accepts that. But you are worse.
The past two generations of Moab politicians were cowards. They shied away from conflict and hoped magical thinking and compromises would fix every problem from real estate colonization to climate change. Their legacy is a disaster. But politics evolves.
City streets are public property. Not “your” ground. You haven’t purchased them and you don’t own them. You share them, which is why it is right and natural that communities get to vote on what kind of impacts for-profit companies can inflict.
If Utah keeps treating Moab like a colony, its authority will steadily disintegrate and eventually its pretensions will be resisted. Similarly, if the owners of noise polluting devices keep “loving” Moab like Putin loves Ukraine, they too will be resisted. This is biology. Every cornered animal will defend its nest and its young.
You have options to solve this peacefully. You can tell your political friends to back off and respect local communities’ right to determine how much harassment and pollution they will tolerate. You can accept your neighbors’ democratically expressed will and move your pollution out of earshot of their homes. You can invest in electric UTVs. You can sell off your fleets and invest in any other business you can imagine that does not harass anyone.
Or if you really are that arrogant, you can keep on being a bully and doing what you are doing. If you want to see an entire town of families snap, keep on driving them to their breaking point. If that’s the bed you want to sleep in, keep on making it.
Christian Wright
Moab
