Anne Arundel County residents have been blown away by noisy leaf blowers, prompting the County Council to introduce a bill to leave combustion engine-powered blowers behind. The bill will be withdrawn Tuesday, however, due to pushback from small businesses.
The bill was introduced in July by District 6 County Council member Lisa Rodvien. It would have prohibited the sale and use of a combustion engine-powered leaf blower or vacuum with a noise level greater than 70dBat a distance of 50 feet. Penalties could have included a civil fine and potential citation.
Rodvien said the noise, the negative health effects and the environmental concerns of the leaf blowers prompted the bill.
Potential risks from gas-powered leaf blowers include respiratory health issues, increased asthma risk, heart disease, cancer and dementia, according to the Institute for Climate Change, Environmental Health, and Exposomics website.
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“The driving thing is really the environmental concerns, because even though there aren’t that many of them, and they’re small, [the leaf blowers] don’t have to meet emission standards the way cars do or trucks do,” Rodvien said.
District 5 council member Amanda Fiedler said everyone knows combustion engine leaf blowers are loud and aren’t great for the environment, but they’re not the worst offenders.
For certain types of emissions, however, the leaf blowers are worse than cars or trucks, Rodvien said. For instanceground level ozone, which comes from gas-powered leaf blowers, is a greenhouse gas.
Fiedler said the industry doesn’t have the technology to have an equivalent battery operated machine that that can last as long as the gas devices. Larger battery-powered leaf blowers with the equivalent power to a gas blower are about $1,500 each.
“They’re very small businesses owned by people who live in our community and have two or three employees that they send out on trucks,” Fiedler said. “So, they’re not operations that could absorb the increase in costs without either going out of business or passing that cost to their customers. And a lot of the customers were saying, ‘We can’t absorb this cost.’”
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County residents had mixed reactions to the proposed bill, prompting Rodvien to withdraw it.
The county’s constituent services team received an email stating a resident’s formal opposition to the bill.
“While I recognize that this initiative may stem from good intentions, it effectively acts as an additional tax on all residents of Anne Arundel County,” the resident said. “This measure is both nonsensical and illogical, particularly given that many electric leaf blowers exceed the World Health Organization’s recommended decibel level of 55.”
The resident went on to say that the proposed bill would burden residents who are “already grappling with rising prices for essentials like groceries and batteries.”
Other residents had mixed reactions to the bill’s withdrawal. Facebook users shared their frustrations and support under Fiedler’s Facebook post about the bill’s withdrawal.
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John Kind said in a Facebook post: “This was the right thing to do. This bill would have created an unfair expense for local businesses, that in the end would be passed onto the customers.”
Facebook user Justyn Kopack had a different take, saying the bill’s withdrawal wasn’t a victory, and that he hopes the council will propose ideas to help businesses transition to the newer electric leaf blowers.
“Limits on duration and hours for use, not using blowers for small jobs that don’t require them, gradual phase out with incentives for early adopters. Anything other than the just keeping the status quo indefinitely,” Kopack commented. “Also, these small businesses aren’t the only workers who matter. The sound is maddening for people working from home, not to mention trying to conduct business calls with the daily blowing for hours on end in the background. My dog won’t even go outside when it’s going on.”
Rodvien said she understands people being upset by the noise.
“A lot of people are irritated by the noise of the things and frustrated that they can’t sit in their backyard in peace and quiet because someone in the neighborhood is running a gas-powered blower, or they work from home, and their home is their office, and they are subject to the disruption at home,” Rodvien said.
She has been having conversations with small business owners and landscapers to eventually create a new bill, she added.
