MANY TOPICS divide Americans: illegal immigration, abortion, the rights of transgender people. And then there are leaf blowers. In recent years dozens of municipalities have enacted ordinances restricting or entirely banning the use of petrol-powered garden tools. Over 160 cities now ban them, according to CoPIRG, a Colorado-based consumer watchdog. The politics of such bans is not always straightforward. Places choosing to do it should prepare for blowback.
One of the most recent bans was passed in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia that is home to about 60,000 people, where the city council agreed to an ordinance on November 19th. Over 50 residents turned out to offer public comment. The “leaf-blower scourge”, said Nancy Winkler, who supported the ordinance, is unsustainable. Blowers are “offensively loud, toxic tools”. This was not the view of all of her neighbours. “You’re going to crush small businesses,” replied Gerhart Arndt, who runs a landscaping firm. The debate dragged on for the best part of three hours.
It is easy to see why people dislike petrol-powered leaf blowers. They are appallingly noisy, at a frequency that penetrates walls. Their two-stroke engines are noxious. Using a single blower for an hour emits as much particulate matter as driving 1,100 miles (1,770km), according to the California Air Resources Board, a state agency. Modern cars have far more pollution controls, points out Kirsten Schatz of CoPIRG. Often users do not even collect leaves up, but instead just blow them into neighbouring properties. Yet the blowers have their defenders too. Landscaping firms operate on thin margins, and their owners generally say electric blowers are not as good. Golf clubs worry about what bans would mean for their costs.
The arguments can almost lead to blows. When Portland, Oregon, passed a restriction on leaf blowers last year, 800 people left public comments—more than for almost any other recent topic, says Eli Bonilla, a city spokesperson. Last year in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, dozens of landscapers organised a protest outside city hall after an ordinance came into effect. That said, rage has not quite risen to the level it did in Los Angeles in 1998 (because of worse air pollution, many Californian cities have banned petrol-powered blowers for decades). After a ban came into force in the Golden State, landscapers held a weeklong hunger strike.
Inevitably, there is a partisan hue. The towns banning leaf blowers tend to skew to the left. In Lower Merion, over three-quarters of voters plumped for Kamala Harris last year. Conservatives generally take a more libertarian view and prefer not to limit property-owners’ rights to blow. The state governments of Texas and Georgia, both run by Republicans, have passed laws banning municipalities from treating petrol-powered leaf blowers differently from electric ones.
As the bans spread, and Democrats and Republicans compete harder for the votes of residents of leafy suburbs, rancour will surely grow. At last year’s Democratic convention Barack Obama compared Donald Trump to “the neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day”. Mr Trump’s supporters say: sure, your neighbour might suck, but that’s his right. Leaf him alone.■
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