News

A county employee uses a gas-powered blower to clear leaves and twigs from a path in Gulfstream Park. BELOW RIGHT: Jim Reynolds, with his wife, Susan Beil, says the noise is ‘like an explosion of sound.’ Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Noisy yet practical leaf movers lose favor in sea of complaints

By John Pacenti

Susan Beil says she feels she has a superpower. Every time she sits to relax on the front porch of her Delray Beach home, the roar of a gas leaf blower somewhere, somehow pierces her serenity — almost like magic.

“They’re a wonderful thing, but I think we should either have them all work on one day, or we should consider having noise-reduction leaf blowers,” said Beil, who lives in the Seagate neighborhood between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean.

“I understand that’s very expensive, and it’s a hardship for the people who are working in agriculture, but they are very noisy.”

Jim Reynolds — Beil’s husband — put it this way: “It’s like an explosion of sound the minute we sit on the porch.”

Municipalities throughout Florida and the nation are grappling with the roar of the gas-powered leaf blower. The number of communities banning them is growing, including Palm Beach, Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, Naples and South Miami.

In Winter Park, near Orlando, residents next year will vote on the topic in response to state lawmakers’ attempts this year to pass a law prohibiting cities, towns and villages from regulating the noisy beasts.

Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed $100,000 allocated to this year’s budget to study leaf blowers. That veto also nixed a provision meant to handcuff municipalities by keeping them from regulating the machines.

No imminent restrictions
The gas-powered leaf blower remains ubiquitous in neighborhoods that run along State Road A1A.

On a random Tuesday, Oct. 15 to be exact, a lot of leaf blowers were in action — dozens — as a Coastal Star reporter ducked in and out of neighborhoods. For more than 30 minutes, someone working at Gulfstream Park blew dirt on and off the paths.

There’s been a lot of hot air expelled on what to do by both residents and elected officials, but not so much action.

Delray Beach Mayor Tom Carney said when he was knocking on doors during his campaign that 50% of the time the complaint he heard was about leaf-blower noise — especially on the barrier island.

“We haven’t looked at the issue yet because we’ve been too busy doing other matters, but there certainly is a strong feeling out there,” said Carney, who took office in March.

He said going electric in such a large city could be financially burdensome for the landscape companies.

“Maybe they should only be allowed to use them on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You know, give people some relief,” he said. “I hear them on Saturdays at 8 o’clock in the morning.

They are intrusive, yes. So, I think there’s a real sense that something needs to be done.”

Manalapan and Ocean Ridge will respond to individual noise complaints.

In Manalapan, Mayor John Deese says he hasn’t heard any complaints from residents on the topic.

In Ocean Ridge, Betty Bingham, 90, a former town commissioner, asked the commission at its Oct. 7 meeting if there was a way to write citations that carried no monetary fines, to get leaf blower users to be “civil.”

“I thought the idea of these blowers was to blow weeds into a central place where people could pick them up and put them in a barrel to put out for pickup. Instead, they seem to be to blow, make a lot of noise, a lot of fumes, throw the leaves into the street or under the hedges [or] into the next-door neighbor’s yard,” she said.

In Gulf Stream, officials have batted around the issue for years but never enacted a restriction.

Joan Orthwein, a former Gulf Stream mayor and current town commissioner, said the town first discussed a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers about a decade ago.

“We reached out to the lawn services, and at the end of the day, they just said they’d have to eliminate Gulf Stream,” she said.

The issue came up again in 2021 when Town Manager Greg Dunham surveyed what neighboring communities do about the issue, but the commission decided not to enact restrictions.

In Highland Beach, resident Barbara Nestle has lobbied her town’s leaders to no avail to ban the gas-powered blowers — after all, the town has a Tranquility Drive.

“In Highland Beach, all you hear is leaf blowers. You don’t even hear the ocean anymore,” she said. “And the noise is disgusting. It’s a disturbance, and it’s also unhealthy — especially for the mind.”

A gas-powered leaf blower clears a path at Gulfstream Park just north of Gulf Stream. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

The impact on work crews
A Harvard study on short- and long-term exposure found noise pollution can lead to an increased risk of heart-related problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says loud noise can damage hearing over time.

This is all bad news for the actual users, many of them immigrants who work for landscaping companies.

Andres Pascual, though, looked perplexed when stopped from his leaf blowing at the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary in Boca Raton when asked if he ever thought about how the noise or gas fumes might be harmful to his health. He wore no mask or ear plugs.

For him it was a simple equation: “If the blower is like strong, like powerful, then it makes the job more easier,” said Pascual, who said he works for the city of Boca Raton.

Billy Blackman, owner of Able Tree Service in Boynton Beach, said he went electric for chain saws, trimmers and other equipment and it has saved his company money.

“It’s because we don’t buy gas,” Blackman said, before adding an important caveat.

“We just buy gas for our big big backpack blowers. Yeah, they’re aggravating, and I hate them, and I know that all the neighbors hate them, but all our other stuff is battery-powered,” he said.

Blackman said there is no battery-powered leaf blower that equals the power of the backpack leaf blower. “They make the medium-sized, but they don’t make the giant one,” he said. “At the end of the job, when you’re tired, it takes 15 minutes. You blow everything off and you are going home.”

To blow or not to blow
The issue of banning leaf blowers is strangely polarizing and weirdly political. A post seeking comment on the Facebook group Delray Raw drew so many nasty replies that moderators had to take it down. Apparently, some have the attitude that meddlesome lawmakers will have to pry the gas leaf blowers from their cold dead hands.

A similar post on the website Nextdoor for Boca Raton got the same vitriol among the 96 comments. Some residents mocked those who said that the gas-powered leaf blowers were too loud and that maybe they could be banned on the weekends. They asked what’s next, banning crying babies. Another responded, “Be less sensitive.”

Beil in Delray Beach gets it. “It’s a first-world problem,” she said.

But it is a problem. Others in the Boca Raton Nextdoor thread who responded did have babies whom leaf blowers had awakened.

Advocates of restricting the gas-powered devices say the leaf blowers are like torture for the noise-adverse, such as those on the autism spectrum. And so many people work from home — go ahead, try your Zoom call with a gas-powered leaf blower at 75 decibels next door.

Besides health concerns, there is damage to the environment. Let’s just say the gas-powered leaf blower is the unfiltered Camel cigarette of its day when it comes to pollution.

A report by the Public Interest Network found in 2020 that in Florida alone, gas-powered lawn and garden equipment contributed 2.6 million tons of carbon dioxide, second only to California. Lawn equipment in Palm Beach County emitted nearly 310,000 tons that year, sixth most of any county in the nation and the most of any in Florida. That’s the equivalent of total annual emissions from 68,239 cars.

Florida ranked first among all states for fine particulate emissions — and in nitrogen oxide emissions — from lawn and garden equipment.

“There’s so many actions that are going to have to be taken to reach various stated climate goals of various municipalities, this one seems pretty easy to do,” said Aaron DeMayo, chair of the city of Miami’s Climate Resilience Committee and a proponent of his city banning gas-powered leaf blowers in favor of electric.

“We have the technology. It’s not expensive. It works,” he said.

Other stuff is loud, too
Could gas-powered leaf blowers be a scapegoat, an easy target when it comes to noise pollution?

Besides leaf blowers, there is plenty of noise from crews working on homes under construction or undergoing renovations. Noise emanates from other lawn equipment used by landscaping companies and from loud municipal projects — a drilling company was observed boring into a Boca Raton street.

“What’s more annoying is the construction over there — that’s what’s annoying,” Arnie Schwartz said, pointing to a house while walking in his Boca Raton Spanish River Land neighborhood.

Here is a fact, Jack: There is little consensus on what to do or whether to do anything.

Boca Raton Spanish River Land resident Nick Wagner was working in his front yard, which had been transformed into a butterfly garden. Gulf fritillaries danced above his cassia and milkweed. Wagner wants the gas-powered leaf blowers banned.

“I think it’s really invasive,” he said. “It’s too much to be honest. I don’t think it’s fair, and you don’t necessarily even have to use them. They just insist on doing it.”

Meanwhile on Tranquility Drive in Highland Beach, Alisa Musa was walking her dogs and taking a que será, será attitude.

“I am not a complainer. They got to keep it clean,” she said.

Schwartz said banning leaf blowers or forcing landscapers to go electric just isn’t realistic.

“Certain things sound good, but you can’t put them in action,” he said. “So what happens is that if you get rid of them, what are you going to do with all the leaves? Rake them? I haven’t seen anybody with a rake out here in 20 years.”