The Sound and the Fury : When Neighborhood Activists Tried to Outlaw Noisy Leaf Blowers in Los Angeles, the City Council Found It Had a Highly Emotional Issue on Its Hands

The thing that strikes people when they meet Elmer (Lindy) Linberg is that he doesn’t look like someone who spent 37 years in the FBI dealing with hijackings, bank robberies and foreign counterintelligence operations. He’s too soft-spoken and unassuming--more like Jimmy Stewart playing a college professor. In fact, it is that very diffidence that made him such a reasonable and effective spokesman for last summer’s drive to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from Los Angeles. The problem was, the issue churned up so much bitter passion that, by the time it reached the City Council, diffidence and reason were almost beside the point.

For Linberg, the leaf-blower issue first arose in the winter of 1984 in the usually peaceful streets of Roscomare Valley, a well-maintained and comfortable upper-middle-class neighborhood between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, just east of Sepulveda Pass. As president of the Roscomare Valley homeowners’ group, Linberg spent most of his time mediating minor disputes: a dog sneaking in a neighbor’s cat door, a vintage actress building a room addition too close to the street, a pediatrician holding loud parties in his hot tub every night. But that December, people began calling Linberg to complain about leaf blowers--that they were a deafening nuisance that plagued shut-ins, drowned out telephone conversations, asphyxiated joggers and blew dust on neighborhood children.

On April 20, 1985, Linberg wrote to Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, asking him, on behalf of the Roscomare Valley Assn., to address this “quantum leap in noise level” by drafting an ordinance to ban leaf blowers from the city.

Personally, Yaroslavsky said, he had little love for the machines: “The noise and fumes are debilitating.” On the other hand, he hadn’t gotten many complaints about them, and he didn’t feel that, in comparison to such issues as South Africa or nuclear disarmament, they were a pressing concern. Besides, he said, it was possible that he would bring up the subject only to discover that no one else on the council would see it “as a sufficiently important issue to do something about.”

Throughout summer and fall of 1985, Yaroslavsky didn’t take a stand. Then, in December, he replied to a question from a Santa Monica Evening Outlook reporter by saying that leaf blowers weren’t really an issue. Whereupon his constituents flooded him with letters: “What do you mean, ‘It’s not an issue’?”

Those letters, and continuing pressure from Lindy Linberg, finally inspired Yaroslavsky to act. In February, 1986, he made a motion before the City Council proposing to prohibit the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers in residential areas of the city.

The response, he would later say, was “incredible.” No piece of legislation he had sponsored had engendered as much enthusiastic support. “I got 150 letters--from every part of town,” Yaroslavsky says, “and it just kept snowballing.”

On June 6, after two lengthy hearings before Councilman Ernani Bernardi’s Public Health, Human Resources and Senior Citizens Committee, the measure came before the City Council for a vote. Although a majority of the city’s gardeners are Latino, few of them showed up for the meeting. Instead, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation Inc., whose members are almost all of Japanese ancestry, filled the council chambers with about 150 middle-aged men--all dignified, serious and neatly dressed in work clothes. For sympathetic onlookers, it was easy to envision these people as men who, with infinite patience and ancestral knowledge of the soil, turn the city green with thriving plants. To the less sympathetic, they were hard-nosed businessmen who in some cases earn $60,000 or more a year, drive Mercedeses and own four-unit apartment houses in West Los Angeles.

The council, not wanting to make a hard choice in the face of such unified opposition, sent the matter back to Bernardi’s committee with instructions to come up with a compromise.

The problem was that neither side thought a compromise was necessary. Advocates of a ban argued that blowers are so incredibly loud (as much as 100 times louder than the city’s 65-decibel noise standard) that it is impossible to ignore them within three city blocks. Beyond the volume, they said, the devices have an angry, high-pitched “snarl” that seems to come through the walls and reverberate in one’s head.

Nor are these merely the objections of people with over-refined sensibilities. According to Edward Stainbrook, a USC professor emeritus of psychiatry who specializes in stress management, many people react to the sound of a leaf blower the same way they react to someone screaming at them: angrily and defensively. To them, Stainbrook says, the noise is a “calculated insult.” At the same time, Stainbrook says, the operator may hear such noise as the satisfying sound of work in progress. Far from disturbing him, it gives him “a sense of power and mastery of the situation.”

Although the noise is intolerable, ban advocates say, that isn’t the only reason to get rid of the machines; they also fill the air with powdered cat and dog feces, fertilizer, insecticide and powdered asbestos from automobile brake shoes.

Finally, says Linberg, leaf blowers don’t perform any useful service that can’t be accomplished just as effectively and a lot more quietly with hoses and brooms. Most of the time the gardeners merely blow the debris up in the air or into the street. E. J. Peaker, an Encino actress who was active in the ban-the-blower coalition, Los Angeles United Against Leaf Blowers, says that she can’t wash her car on Friday to go out that night because “the neighbor’s gardener comes by and blows trash all over my car again.”

Julie Newmar, an actress who played the Catwoman on television’s “Batman” series, says she once tried to drown out the noise of leaf blowers in her Brentwood neighborhood by closing her windows and doors and running water in the sinks. When she asked the gardener to stop using the machine, he threatened to hit her over the head with it.

That made Newmar so mad that she distributed hundreds of handwritten flyers and put up notices on bulletin boards asking political activists to help organize opposition to blowers. But most of the activists, she discovered, were more interested in banning aid to the contras than they were in banning blowers.

TO THE PEOPLE WHO OPPOSE A BAN, most of the accusations made about the machines are simply unsupportable by evidence. Former Councilman Art Snyder, who lobbied the council on behalf of the Gardeners’ Federation, says that of the 335 noise complaints made to the city Department of Building and Safety during fiscal 1985, only 10 involved leaf blowers. There were far more made about noisy air condi-tioners.

Furthermore, he argues, arresting and booking a gardener would take two police officers two hours--a ridiculous allocation of resources “in a community where a major crime occurs once every hour.”

Seiji Horio, the no-nonsense president of the Gardeners’ Federation, freely admits that a blower is “a real noisy machine.” But, he says, “people act like the blower is on all day long. At most, it’s on five or 10 minutes at each house.” Besides, Horio says, when Bernardi’s committee tested blowers outside City Hall, background traffic exceeded the 65-decibel noise standard. “But nobody is going to ban the automobile.” In addition, Horio says, forbidding the use of leaf blowers in residential areas is unfair in that self-employed gardeners would have to give up their machines, while gardeners who work for the city would be exempt.

Perhaps the worst consequence of a leaf-blower ban, the Gardeners’ Federation contends, is the economic effect that it would have on the gardeners. Although representatives of the federation refuse to discuss their members’ income and become a bit panicky when asked about it, they argue that it would take gardeners 30% longer to do each yard if they were forced to substitute brooms and hoses. It is easy enough for opponents to tell them to pass the cost to their clients, Horio says, but gardening is one industry in which prices can’t be raised at will; homeowners would fire their gardeners and mow the grass themselves. As a result, the members of his federation would have to either accept a substantial drop in income or work longer hours--an unenviable prospect for a group of men whose average age is 60 and who work eight- to 10-hour days.

Finally, Horio says, he wishes that the City Council would make up its mind. During the drought of 1977, it urged gardeners to quit using hoses to wash down sidewalks and driveways and to start using blowers. Now, Horio says, just because “Yaroslavsky wants to be mayor,” they have to go back to hoses again.

UNTIL THE ISSUE ERUPTED, THE GARDENERS’ Federation had been a low-profile organization. But the unprecedented danger of a blower ban caused them to mobilize all resources, sending a three-page letter of warning to members, flooding council representatives with post cards, hiring lobbyists, testifying at public hearings and setting up a telephone hot line to respond to noise complaints. In spite of all this, the organization failed to persuade the head of the Public Health committee, Ernani Bernardi. Twice the matter came before his committee, and twice he delivered the same recommendation: Outlaw blowers.

Bernardi is not, he says, unsympathetic to the gardeners. His real objection, he maintains, is to the blower manufacturers who--despite having had their products banned by such cities as Beverly Hills, Lomita and Carmel--drag their feet about making quieter machines. Instead, they asked for a one-year moratorium on such an ordinance. (“Even the most grubby special interest never had the audacity to request a moratorium on legislation,” Yaroslavsky said later.) And in the end, Bernardi decided that he’d been right the first time: Only a ban would force manufacturers to muffle their machines.

Don Purcell, a spokesman for the Portable Power Equipment Manufacturers Assn., an industry association that represents leaf-blower makers, says the organization never asked the Bernardi committee for a moratorium. But the manufacturers do need time, he says, to design quieter engines, fans and air nozzles. When you’re moving air at 170 m.p.h., he says, it’s bound to make a certain amount of noise, and you can’t solve engineering problems like that overnight.

Afterward, observers and participants would describe the City Council meeting of Aug. 12 as a “carnival,” a “zoo,” a “circus” and a “mess.” Council opposition to the leaf-blower ban was led by Howard Finn, who died shortly after the meeting; David Cunningham, who has since quit the council, and Gilbert Lindsay. It was Lindsay’s contention that the issue was a simple one: Rich folks eating “caviar” in their big fancy houses didn’t want to be disturbed by the sound of “a good, honest” gardener trying to earn a living. If the ordinance was passed, it would divert the police from important work and put the gardeners out of business. Lindsay told the assembled gardeners: “I’ll never be guilty of causing another human being to go hungry as long as I live.”

Lindy Linberg tried to dispel the elitist image of his umbrella coalition, Los Angeles United Against Leaf Blowers, by saying that it represented 175 homeowners’ associations with a total membership in the “hundreds of thousands” from all parts of the city. And he reminded the council that inasmuch as not a single gasoline-powered leaf blower met the 65-decibel standard, every time a gardener fired one up he was breaking the law. When one considers that the devices are both illegal and objectionable, he said, “the desire of a few thousand gardeners and manufacturers cannot be justified.”

Gerson Ribnick, a Gardeners’ Federation lobbyist, countered that prohibiting blowers would have a “devastating economic impact” on the city’s largely minority gardening industry. “It may be true that it wasn’t planned that way,” he said, “but how can you ignore the facts?” If their blowers were taken away, Ribnick contended, gardeners would have to work 14 hours a day instead of their customary 10 to maintain their standard of living. “Gardeners perform a great service,” he concluded. “Yet the opposition almost calls them criminal. Is the act of gardening criminal?”

When it was Finn’s turn, he wondered aloud about the legality of an ordinance that applied only to leaf blowers and ignored model-airplane engines. “They come out in the early morning. And what about chain saws? Doesn’t anybody care about chain saws? Or how about motorcycles? Why don’t we stop them?”

“I’d be happy to regulate the model-airplane problem,” Yaroslavsky replied, “but this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Cunningham now stood up to denounce the ban-the-blower people for wasting the council’s time with a harebrained scheme to arrest gardeners when crack dealers were running rampant.

“You know what I’d do if they pass this ban?” Cunningham told the gardeners. “I’d go right on with my business as usual. I’d force them to arrest me, put me in jail and take the blower off my back.” But the fact was, he said, the police were not about to permit criminals to go free in order to harass noisy gardeners.

After a long, confusing and, to some people in the audience, largely irrelevant debate, council President Pat Russell ordered a vote on the question of whether to substitute a plan by Finn for the ban recommended by the Bernardi committee. The Finn proposal allowed leaf-blower operation at 65 decibels from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and at 75 decibels from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

When the council voted 8 to 6 to substitute Finn’s measure for Bernardi’s, thus killing any prospects for a ban, Yaroslavsky slumped in his seat and showed his disgust by playing on a kazoo. Then, as debate continued on Finn’s proposal, it suddenly occurred to Yaroslavsky that the Finn plan was, if anything, worse than no ordinance at all because it allowed noise levels 10 decibels higher than the current 65-decibel standard.

In response to Yaroslavsky, Finn withdrew his measure and made an amended motion to restrict the use of chain saws, lawn mowers and leaf blowers to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., regardless of decibel level.

This time it was Councilman Richard Alatorre who thought the motion was ridiculous. “I don’t have a gardener. In other words, I’ve got to leave work early so I can mow my lawn before 5 o’clock?” he asked incredulously. “I can’t believe you would even think of passing an ordinance like this.”

Neither could the required eight council members, and the motion died on a 7-7 vote. Yaroslavsky, who at this point was willing to accept any restrictions on blowers no matter how slight, complained that the anti-blower forces had “loved” the Finn proposal “to death,” meaning that they had deliberately made the measure so all-inclusive that its own supporters had to reject it.

After several other related motions were voted down, by increasingly greater margins, Russell quietly announced the next agenda item. Cunningham stood up in surprise. “There’s nothing before us? There’s nothing on the desk?”

When Russell explained that the ban was dead, Lindsay turned triumphantly to the assembled gardeners and spread his arms wide: “Nothing has changed. Everything remains the same.”

The ban advocates were so exasperated by the council’s actions that when Howard Finn died later that day of a ruptured aorta, Burton Farber, an anti-blower activist and retired design engineer from Van Nuys, couldn’t help seeing it as divine retribution: “Finn made that motion and God struck him down.”

Linberg spent the rest of the day taking telephone calls from indignant supporters. To Julie Newmar, the council’s behavior that day was a “bitter embarrassment.” Lindsay, she says, had turned the meeting into a “shambles.” Finn “consistently fouled the issue.” And Cunningham not only “represented his district with a tirade of passionate factual distortions,” but he also spent most of the debate either talking on the telephone, baby-sitting his 2 1/2-year-old daughter, sitting with his feet up on his desk or rolling around in his castered chair. E. J. Peaker says the meeting gave her such a pain in the neck that she had to get a massage.

Despite having routed the ban-the-blower crowd, Horio was still troubled. And at the gardeners’ victory dinner the following Saturday night, he interrupted the celebration to remind them that they weren’t out of the woods yet. “We have to educate the non-members,” Horio says. “Otherwise, it is going to come up again.”

One thing Horio does to reach non-federation gardeners is to hand out the organization’s blower guidelines. The guidelines, which the group has been distributing in English and Spanish for eight years, suggest hours of operation and ways to minimize disruption. Horio has also taken to stopping his truck in the street whenever he sees gardeners unnecessarily using full power or blowing dust on passing cars. The problem is that they are so unaware that the city is even thinking about a ban, he says, that when he asks them to stop, they not only refuse to listen, they tell him “it’s none of your business.”