Sonoma’s leaf-blower initiative latest skirmish in long battle
“The ban-the-blower forces complain not only that the tools are noisy and smoky but that they scatter more dust than they collect. Professional gardeners, reluctant to throw in the Space Age broom, maintain that the tools have not only revolutionized their business but have helped keep America beautiful.”
So reads a newspaper article on a growing trend to ban leaf blowers that sounds like it could have been written last week, about Sonoma. But the story is dated Dec. 23, 1985, and it ran in the Los Angeles Times. Clearly, this is not a new issue, nor a local one.
Sonoma's immersion in the quicksand of leaf blower control places the city smack dab in the middle of a statewide if not national debate that shows no sign of letting up. Some estimate that more than 50 cities in the state have some sort of control over the landscaping machines, ranging from limiting hours of operation, which is what Sonoma currently does, to outright bans for both gas and electric blowers.
Sonoma's current regulations – the ordinance was passed in 2011 to limit hours of operation – are fairly mainstream among towns with leaf-blower ordinances. The effort to ban gas-powered blowers – which was approved by the City Council in May and is up for public referendum on the city ballot as Measure V – would, if passed, put us only a few steps outside the mainstream, but by no means on an island.
According to a 2010 Consumer Reports survey, 32 of the 55 state jurisdictions with some form of blower restrictions ban gasoline powered leaf-blowers; six of those ban both gas and electric. Twenty-two merely restrict days and hours of use. (The City of Davis does neither, but bans blowers above a certain decibal level.) Thus, for towns that have implemented leaf-blower restrictions, it is more common to ban gas blowers than it is to allow them. (Those numbers, of course, have likely shifted since 2010.)
However, given there are 482 municipalities in California, having leaf-blower restrictions at all is far from the norm. Limiting leaf blowers is anomalous; laissez-faire is apparently the law of the land.
Still, knowing that over half of the cities that regulate leaf blowers ban gas machines outright shows precedence for Measure V. And their reasons for doing so are consistent: the generally louder range of noise that two-stroke engines emit; air pollution from the gas motors themselves (which do not have catalytic converters as do automobiles); and the micro-debris they kick up by their action, the so-called “fugitive dust” that some blame for respiratory ailments.
With the single exception of Mill Valley, all of the cities in California that ban all leaf blowers are seaside communities – Santa Monica, Laguna Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Del Mar, as well as the state's first to ban the blowers, Carmel-by-the-Sea, which did so in 1975.
Marin County has a number of cities with some form of leaf-blower control, including San Anselmo, Fairfax, Ross, Tiburon, Belvedere and San Rafael. In Sonoma County, only two do – Rohnert Park, which prohibits leaf-blower use between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. most days, and Sonoma, which currently limits residential use of leaf blowers to between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, a bit longer in public and park zones where they can fire up at 7 a.m., and longer still in industrial zones where they can be used until 11 p.m.
Looking at the effect of leaf blower bans or day/hourly restrictions in the nearby Marin communities can help put Measure V in context. Mill Valley's outright ban on gas-powered leaf blowers went into effect in 1993, the same year that the Township of San Anselmo implemented its own less draconian regulations, which limit days and hours of use.
It's instructive that Mill Valley doesn't entirely ban the use of leaf blowers, but controls leaf blowing, and hence the random dispersal of yard waste and fugitive dust. “Residents and gardeners can use electric leaf blowers or electric leaf vacuums to collect and dispose of leaves,” said Mill Valley's assistant city manager, Linn Walsh. “People generally blow the leaves into a pile and then collect them for disposal.”
Yet even now, 23 years since Mill Valley's rules went into effect, violations of the city's ban still occur. “It's mainly a problem with landscape contractors,” said Denise Anderson, maintenance operations supervisor in Mill Valley. “They already have the tools and they work in different cities, so they just use what's in their truck.” Residents can and do call the Mill Valley Police to complain, and citations are issued, but as Anderson said, “The police usually have more important things to do.”
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