We May Blow It Again

This week, Los Angeles’ 11-year-old drama with leaf blowers likely will reach its climax. The City Council will confront the issue on Wednesday, albeit in one of its typically weird convolutions.

Namely, the council must decide whether it has the political will to enforce a law it has already passed. As of this writing, few are willing to predict the outcome.

You may recall that the council banned gasoline leaf blowers as of last July. You may also recall that the ban had no impact whatsoever because the council decided, just days after its enactment, to delay enforcement.

Perhaps the members were aghast that they had actually made a decision. In any case, they delayed, and now the allotted time of the delay has run out. So they must decide whether they meant what they said. Or not.

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I confess I waltz into this particular fight with some trepidation. Getting worked up over leaf blowers carries a certain taint, you know what I mean? It suggests a fussiness, like maybe you are a man who wears bow ties.

On Friday, Councilman Mike Feuer referred to that taint. “You see this stuff, like in Time magazine, where they poke fun at Los Angeles for dealing with this.”

True, but is it not New York itself--Time’s hometown--that lately has become obsessed with similar issues, ranging from double-parked trucks to bums on the street to kamikaze bicycle messengers? And has not New York lumped all these issues under the moniker “quality of life” and elevated its mayor to sainthood for pursuing same?

That’s right. Here in Los Angeles, in fact, we have come very late to the quality of life issue. Whereas cities like New York seem spiffed up and energized, Los Angeles continues in the hangdog ways of yore.

Our burg often feels bedraggled and defeated because no one seems to care about the details. Recently I was listening to a radio talk show about downtown. A city bureaucrat was asked why the sidewalks of downtown were uniformly treeless, graceless and smeared with filth.

The bureaucrat said he had become interested in this question himself and made inquiries. The answer, he said, was simple: No one at City Hall is in charge of downtown sidewalks. He admitted that this situation might constitute “a problem.”

The leaf blower situation works the same way. How many times have you been run out of your own backyard, off your own deck, by that unique banshee scream? How many times have you watched the ludicrous exchange where dust gets blown from your property over to your neighbor’s, and then back again to yours?

And, as the years pass and the howling goes on, how many times has the implied message come across that this kind of problem, no matter how much it eats at your soul, is beneath the notice of the pooh-bahs who run the city?

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On Wednesday, we’ll find out just what the pooh-bahs intend this time. For what it’s worth, Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski will submit an amendment that changes a violation of the ban from a misdemeanor to a citation.

That change should eliminate a flaw in the original ordinance, making it far easier for the police to enforce.

But it’s my guess that the debate will quickly devolve into racial posturing. That’s how we do things these days in the City Council. Any issue--the construction of a subway, say, or the question of whether a confessed coke addict should resign from elective office--gets converted to race.

So the gardeners will arrive to say that the leaf blower ban is another example of the rich man trying to steal the food off their table or the shoes off their feet. At their last demonstration, in fact, the gardeners arrived shoeless.

It has a weariness but it may work. It allows the gardeners, and the leaf blower manufacturers, to avoid admitting that gardeners have survived very well in the dozen or so other cities where bans have taken effect. And it allows them to avoid dealing with the fact that their own workers are the greatest victims of the health hazards created by the machines.

In any case, the 11-year drama plays out Wednesday. It began, incidentally, in 1986 when then-Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky submitted the first ordinance to ban blowers.

The proposal elicited more citizen response than any other piece of legislation Yaroslavsky sponsored. Thousands of people came out of the woodwork, begging for enactment of the ban.

But when the day of the vote came, the late Gilbert Lindsay stood to accuse the ban supporters of eating “caviar” in their fancy houses while they deprived “good, honest” gardeners of a way to make a living. On and on it went.

When the first vote came, the ban failed by one vote.

So here we are, doing it again, in 1997. We will see if we do it better this time.