Leaf Blower Ban Is a Gesture With Huge Hidden Costs

I wonder--if I’d had a soplador as a young man, would I have become a newspaper columnist?

Soplador is the Spanish word for leaf blower--the noisy, gasoline-powered gardening tool that could well become Los Angeles’ next political cause celebre if the City Council and Mayor Riordan insist on sticking with an ordinance that bans their use.

Professional gardeners, whose ranks are heavily Latino and Asian American, don’t like the idea. And I am very sympathetic to their cause, having spent more days than I want to remember doing yard work in the heat of Southern California summers.

That was in the 1960s, when I was a high school student. A now-retired uncle had a gardening service in the San Fernando Valley and let me work for him to earn extra money. But the real value of those smoggy, dust-filled days was in how they convinced me never to make a living at manual labor. My uncle would chuckle approvingly when I swore I’d go to college if only to get a job that would pay me enough to hire someone else to do gardening for me. That’s what everyone in my family, none of whom had ever gone to college, wanted to hear.

These days I do, indeed, pay for a gardening service, like many thousands of other area homeowners. And I am often annoyed by noisy leaf blowers. But I question the fairness and wisdom of trying to outlaw them.

Last week, Los Angeles joined 40 other California cities that banned the gasoline-powered machines, both as a public nuisance and as contributors to air pollution. Henceforth any gardener who uses one, or any homeowner who allows a hired gardener to do so, can be fined up to $1,000 and serve six months in jail.

Nobody’s likely to be thrown in jail for misdemeanor leaf blowing anytime soon, of course. The Los Angeles Police Department has made it very clear that dangerous criminals still have priority over noisy gardeners. In fact, most gardeners, law-abiding and hard-working folks that they are, will simply abide by the blower ban. But it will cost them money by slowing the pace at which they can work. The less convenient but still legal electric blowers don’t do the trick.

“Right now, I do 17 yards a day with a crew of three,” one Latino gardener told La Opinion. “Without leaf blowers I can only do eight.”

Facing such harsh fiscal reality, the Assn. of Latin American Gardeners--an organization formed at least partly in reaction to the ban--is asking the city for a one-year delay in the ordinance’s implementation. Gardeners will use the time to work with leaf blower manufacturers to try to come up with a machine that is quieter and less polluting.

That is an eminently reasonable request, and for Riordan or the City Council not to go along with it would be both rigid and insulting. These are the same politicians who, in even the worst drought years, keep city water rates low so suburbanites can water their lawns. They should show the same flexibility with the people who mow those lawns.

In fact, I’ve been struck--nay, appalled--at the number of homeowners quoted in newspaper and television reports on the blower ban who have suggested using garden hoses as a quieter means of rapidly cleaning up leaves and grass cuttings.

Don’t they realize Los Angeles sits on the edge of a desert? Water is the single most precious commodity needed to sustain life here. Given a choice between wasting it on leaf-strewn sidewalks and tolerating leaf blowers, I’ll take the noise.

And I haven’t heard any of the City Council members who voted for the leaf blower ban reminding homeowners that an ordinance was passed during our last serious drought that banned using water hoses to clean sidewalks.

What troubles me most about this controversy is the unspoken assumption that too often lurks around the edges of seemingly mundane municipal issues like water rates. Somehow the concerns of working people who are trying to do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible are never quite so important as keeping residential homeowners happy.

I am not suggesting that there is villainy or even bigotry at work here. But it illustrates a cavalier attitude too many Angelenos share with other residents of the American West. We build great cities in one of the most inhospitable parts of the world and then take for granted the people and resources that make it possible for us to live here so comfortably.