The leader of a car club criticized and cited by police for holding a loud June 26 show at the Chautauqua County Fairgrounds defended himself in an interview Monday.

Juan Rivera of Unique Car Club said city of Dunkirk officials did not communicate properly with him and added that he plans to go ahead with an event at Point Gratiot on Aug. 14. Councilman-at-large Paul VanDenVouver declared at the last Common Council meeting that Rivera’s loudspeaker permit for that event would get revoked.

Rivera explained that when he rented the fairgrounds, he asked if he needed any permits, and said that his show would feature a few cars tricked out with big speakers. He said he was told he would be fine, “as long as it’s not any louder than the Demolition Derby.”

He said he also went to City Hall and specifically asked for Clerk Ed Ramos to double check about permits. Ramos was not there, but a young employee told him he did not need a permit — which is true, because the fairgrounds is not city-owned property.

“I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t need a loudspeaker permit, I’ll start to promote my show.’ I got people coming from Texas, Florida, all over the U.S. to compete,” Rivera said. He planned to give out some 300 trophies in a large variety of categories.

On the day of the car show, “about 12:30 p.m. I told everyone, ‘Dial your radios up because you’re gonna start competing,'” he said. A competition to show off speakers, which Rivera said made for 30 seconds of loud music, followed.

“A little bit later, the police chief (David Ortolano) shows up and asks us to dial it down,” he said. The chief was gracious and left quickly, and Rivera said his response was to ask a live band that was playing at the time to quiet down. He tried to tell the hundreds of competitors to shut off their cars when they weren’t being judged.

“Then my wife calls me on the radio,” he continued: Ortolano was back. “He said, ‘Listen, I’ve gotten 100 something calls about complaints.'”

Rivera would later face four counts of noise violation citations but said there was no threat of such a thing at the time.

Rivera promised the chief he would hand out his 300 trophies immediately, to get the show to break up. “I’m like stressing, going crazy because I had to pick the top 300 out of 1,194 cars,” he said. “We got everybody out, quickly handed out the trophies. … Three police officers walked around and said, ‘We don’t understand why there’s a problem.'”

He said the car show was done by 6:30 p.m., not later as others have claimed, and he and his club stayed on the fairgrounds until 12:30 a.m. because they had to immediately and thoroughly clean the grounds ahead of Fredonia High School’s Sunday, June 27, graduation ceremony.

“Next day I wake up, I hear the police officer out front,” Rivera continued. Ortolano had sent the cop to give him a noise violation citation.

“On the 29th, two days later, the chief sends him back to give me four citations. Shouldn’t I have gotten them all at once?” Rivera wondered.

The car club chief regrets little about his actions but is sorry about one thing: “I do apologize to the (Holy Trinity) wedding party 100 percent,” he said. “If I had known there was a wedding there, I would have directed my music in a different way.”

Even so, Rivera said someone should have told him about the wedding ahead of time, as he had been advertising his event around town, including near City Hall, for weeks.

He also wondered, “What’s closer to the fairground, Fredonia or Dunkirk? All the phone calls came from Dunkirk. Not one person from the other side called the police.”

As for his upcoming Point Gratiot event, Rivera still plans to hold it. He said he has held shows there in the past and doesn’t do car speaker competitions there, and the loudspeaker permit he gets is for a DJ. Rivera added he would pay for the city to deploy a couple of police officers to the event.

“They go crazy talking about all the bad,” Rivera said of his Unique Car Club. “I’ll stand behind it 100 percent.” His Point Gratiot event, held every August, gives out notebooks, pens, pencils and book bags to children for the upcoming school year, he said. They have also donated profits from shows to entities such as Roswell Park, the Boys and Girls Club — and even the Dunkirk Police Department.

All his club members are 35 or older and family men, he said. “We want to do something positive where we show our kids what we do with our cars,” he said.

Rivera plans to address the Common Council about his revoked loudspeaker permit July 20, he said.

The whole affair “is all about a misunderstanding,” he said.