WATERFORD — The Waterford Fish and Game Association has rejected a proposal to stop shooting on certain days in exchange for money.

Peter Pacent Sr., president of the association, said Tuesday that the association would not entertain a Dec. 18 proposal from the Waterford Noise Abatement Coalition to financially contribute to the club in return for assurances there would be no gunfire from the site on specific days in 2015.

“I can tell you the Waterford Fish and Game Association is not for sale,” Pacent said.

Noise Abatement Coalition spokesman John Howe, who has said he and his family can hear the gun noise seven days a week, proposed the financial deal as “a last-ditch effort to regain at least a small portion of the peace and quiet we enjoyed for many prior years.”

Howe and his family live near the gun club on Route 118 across the street from a cemetery and town athletic fields.

The Howes’ fight began about seven years ago when Howe, his wife, Deborah, who both live at 298 McIntire Road, their daughter, Virginia Howe, of 187 McIntire Road, and about 16 neighbors formed the coalition to bring their concerns to selectmen about the escalating noise from the club.

Howe, who has owned the 175-acre farm on McIntire Road for 30 years, said previously he and the gun club lived side by side cooperatively. But when the former Auburn Gun Club shut down and its members and equipment came to Waterford in 2006, the noise issue, particularly with skeet shooting, began.

“These changes resulted in an unprecedented escalation of shooting and dominated the surrounding air space,” Howe wrote in his Dec. 18 letter to the Fish and Game Association.

Since 2007, complaints from cemetery visitors and property owners, public athletic field use, petitions, a terminated lawsuit and an attempt by the club to reduce noise at one of its shooting ranges “all failed to resolve or even mitigate the ongoing gun noise problem,” he wrote.

“What would it cost to buy the privilege to use our properties one, two, three days a week without the constant anxiety of being ‘shot’ (bombarded) with gunfire at any moment?” Howe wrote. The letter does not include a specific amount of money, but it does say the amount could be used to build enclosures to filter the noise.

Pacent said the club was trying to reduce the noise level by building a roof over one of its pistol ranges. He said a roof extension on a rifle range had successfully reduced the noise levels from the muzzle retorts.

Pacent conceded that the club property is used probably every day and there was not much the members could do about the skeet shooting — shotguns used to break clay disks mechanically flung into the air — short of constructing an enclosure the size of the Astrodome sports stadium in Houston, Texas. Skeet shooting occurs “several days a week,” he said.

“It certainly doesn’t go on 24/7, 365 days a year,” he said of the gun noise.

He said steps have been taken and continue to be taken to reduce pistol range noise. He also noted that Howe’s claim that commercial firearms training and military explosive devises being detonated do not occur on the club’s property.

Since the issue surfaced, the club has restricted Sunday shooting hours to 9 a.m. to half an hour after sunset. Weekday shooting is from 8 a.m. until half an hour after sunset. 

In addition, according to the club’s website, it does not allow police departments to qualify on weekends anymore. The club also installed a fence with locked gates. Only club members are allowed to use the facilities. Additionally, shooting of full automatic firearms on Sundays is prohibited, unless a suppressor is used.

The club does not allow any shooting while there is a funeral in progress at the Pulpit Rock Cemetery across from the club.

Howe and the Noise Abatement Coalition have issued complaints, filed a lawsuit, which was later withdrawn, sought property assessment abatements through the Oxford County Board of Assessment Review and taken what Pacent called other forms of  “harassment” against the club in recent years.

In 2012, the Oxford County Board of Assessment Review granted a tax abatement appeal for John and Deborah Howe’s property because of the gun noise.

But in July 2014, the board denied their daughter Virginia Howe’s appeal to have 7.5 percent of her 2012 and 2013 taxes abated because of the gun noise. During that appeal process, the board ruled that the property owner knew of the gun club’s presence when she purchased the property for $139,000 from her parents in 2012.

Waterford assessor and Board of Selectmen Chairman Randy Lessard said this past summer that the issue was not about the gun noise but about what an appropriate tax assessment should be. The Howes’ assessment was at the lowest range the state allows, he said.

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