Ban on Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers Kicks In Today
After months of debate and false starts, punctuated by some of the most impassioned protests City Hall has seen in years, an ordinance effectively banning gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas goes into effect today.
City street-maintenance officials have set up a hotline for people to call to complain if they hear a leaf blower’s telltale whine.
Complaints will prompt the city to send warning letters to offending gardening companies and those who hire them. If a pattern of violations becomes apparent, city officials will cite offenders.
But police enforcement of the ordinance is likely to be spotty, since officers must witness the leaf blower in action in order to issue the $270 tickets called for under the ordinance.
Police are encouraging people to call the city’s hotline--(800) 996-CITY--rather than trying to summon police for leaf-blower infractions. Very bluntly, police say they have higher priorities and are unlikely to have time to pursue renegade gardeners.
Also, authorities add, please don’t call 911 about leaf blowers.
“It’s obvious that [leaf blowers] is not an emergency situation,” Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Maurice Moore said.
In extreme cases, he said, those annoyed by blowers should call directory assistance and ask for a nonemergency number for a local police station.
“I don’t think [enforcement] is going to be difficult,” Moore said. “If someone runs a red light, we write a ticket. If we see a leaf-blower violation, we write a ticket.”
The ordinance banning the use of gas-powered leaf blowers within 500 feet of homes was passed by the City Council in late 1996 and was scheduled to go into effect last July.
But almost immediately after the ordinance took effect, a political uproar ensued, and enforcement was put on hold.
What followed was an escalating series of protests that caught politicians by surprise and drew national attention.
Gardeners marched on City Hall clad in matching baseball caps and sweatshirts, and decried what they portrayed as an attack on the working poor.
Homeowners, weary of the blowers’ chain-saw-like roar, clamored for relief.
The controversy provided a prism for political tensions, tending to highlight those most divisive to strife-weary Angelenos.
It was variously portrayed as a battle between whites and Latinos, affluent Westsiders and the working poor, immigrants and the native-born, environmentalists and profit-seekers.
The demonstrations reached a macabre pitch when a group of gardeners vowed to drink only water until they died, or until the mayor took action to address their grievances.
That ended last month, when the council appeased the gardeners with promises of help, and voted to enforce the current ordinance by authorizing police to issue tickets to leaf-blower users and homeowners who hire them.
Despite the political drama surrounding the issue, however, police are not expecting a deluge of calls.
Leaf-blower complaints have been on the wane since the ordinance burst into prominence last July, said Officer Maria Peppers of the LAPD noise enforcement team.
Last summer, she said, the team received, at most, a couple of leaf blower-related calls a day. Because the ordinance was not yet being enforced, officers did not respond, she said.
A community group, Zero Air Pollution, which also has a leaf-blower hotline--and took as many as a dozen calls a day last summer--similarly attested to a decline in leaf-blower use.
“As people become aware of [the new ordinance], people naturally want to obey the law,” said Jack Allen, a retired Pacific Palisades attorney and activist with the group.
Meanwhile, disgruntled gardeners still contend the ordinance strips them of their livelihood, and plan additional protests as the ordinance takes effect.
“We are not going to back down,” said Alvaro Huerta, spokesman for the Latin-American Gardeners of Los Angeles, a group that staged last month’s protests.
The group is urging gardeners to use the blowers despite the ban.
“We are going to resist the law because it’s unjust . . . it is a harsh and unjust ban,” Huerta said.
Exactly who will violate the ban and where was unclear.
Following a vigil at City Hall on Thursday night, Huerta’s group mapped plans for marches and a news conference today, including a show of leaf blowers in use at a home in the afternoon.
The idea is to draw the attention of the media, Huerta acknowledged matter-of-factly.
“We’ve got a lot of good things for the media to capitalize on,” he said. “We feel like we are producing ‘The Tonight Show’ or something.”
Huerta, a job counselor whose father was a gardener, said the group feels betrayed by the council after members agreed to end the hunger strike on the condition that hearings would be held promptly to address the gardeners’ plight.
While the council has held hearings on alternate technologies for leaf blowers, and Department of Water and Power chief S. David Freeman has offered to try to allocate $1 million for development of new devices, Huerta says these efforts are too little, too late.
Huerta says gardeners should be able to continue using the leaf blowers until better alternatives are available.
The ban is part of a “series of attacks against the Latino immigrant. All they want to do is work, and they [City Council members] are creating this hostility,” Huerta said.
But for those who have fought for a dozen years to get the leaf-blower law enforced, Thursday marked a long-awaited victory.
“Whatever I say will reflect the joy in my community that this is finally going to take effect,” said Allen, the Pacific Palisades activist. “This turns a big corner. . . . The neighborhoods will be quieter, they won’t be as dusty.”
Allen said the pro-leaf blower forces were incited in part by business interests fearful that leaf-blower sales would plummet.
Most homeowners who hire gardeners are not very concerned about fallen leaves, and simply want to keep lawns and hedges trimmed. “The average homeowner who is going to hire a gardener is . . . conscientious about obeying the law,” Allen said.