Drew Badham has just about had it with this city. The small-business owner—who describes himself as “an extreme liberal, by the way”—says every year the Seattle City Council passes a new policy that cuts into his profit margin. But this latest one has him really huffing and puffing and ready to blow City Hall down.
“It’s a complete nightmare if they ban leaf blowers,” says the owner of The Lawn Ranger in Ballard. “Every time the city council does something like this, we have to increase the [price].”
To be clear, there’s no proposal to ban leaf blowers yet. But three council members do ask in the proposed 2014 city budget that the Department of Planning and Development study how the city might go about reducing or eliminating noise from the machines, which to many reads as a polite way to ask “How can we get rid of the damned things?”
Apart perhaps from keeping dog shit off the sidewalk, it’s hard to imagine a city objective more responsive to the petty annoyances of city life. The two-stroke leaf blowers seem to start grinding at the crack of dawn and at the slightest provocation. On a Belltown sidewalk earlier this week, even though the maple trees have already shed the bulk of their leaves, a few late fallers had prompted an apartment caretaker to fire up his gas-powered machine to vanquish the deciduous detritus. The 9 o’clock hour had yet to pass.
“It’s not a new topic, but as we end up having more people living closer to each other, we have to be more conscious of our impact on each other,” says Councilman Nick Licata, who sponsored the budget provision with Richard Conlin and Tom Rasmussen. “It’s about being proactive in seeing how we can make the city more livable; making it more, I would say, a bit mellower.”
Licata emphasizes that the budget calls only for a study of the issue, which would be presented next September. Still, it has users of the machines, like Badham, fired up. He admits they sound awful—“I hate the sound of them. Nobody argues that point”—but he says it’s unrealistic to expect everyone in the lawn-care industry to just start raking again, at least if they’re going keep charging anything close to what they do now.
And what really grinds Badham’s gears is the fact that the City of Seattle currently operates a huge fleet of leaf blowers—the parks department owns 125, according to The Seattle Times—and poorly at that.
“The worst offender is always the city. Their crews are just not very well trained,” he says. “If my guys are running the blowers for five minutes, they city will be running them for 20 minutes.”
Perhaps the city should mind its own shop before it starts meddling with the private sector.
Licata is open to that—he’s open to everything, he emphasizes. But he’s not about to drop the issue. “It’s a legitimate issue, and we do hear from people who have complaints,” he says. “It’s an issue we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to—or, to be more appropriate, a deaf ear.”
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