In late April, the Sacramento City Council voted for another unenforceable, feel-good ordinance: to ban smoking from Sacramento City parks. The No smoking ban includes but is not limited to smoking cigars, pipes, cigarettes, pot, crack, and trout.
The original proposed ordinance was amended dramatically in order to get the needed council support for approval. Because of the changes to the proposed ordinance, the City Council passed an "intent" motion to ban smoking from City parks. An “intent” motion is the result of a stupid proposal that cannot and should not get enough votes to pass. After city officials rewrite this ordinance to reflect the changes, it will go before the council again for a final vote.
The ban will take effect 30 days after approval. The ban also won't apply to adjoining sidewalks or to golf courses. So what good is it? Every city park is surrounded by sidewalks and walking paths. William Land Park golf course is attached to the park. So is the cigar-smoking golfer who hits out-of-bounds issued a ticket for the stogie in his chops, by a police officer waiting in the rough?
City Councilwoman Sandy Sheedy, who was the brainchild behind this groundbreaking ordinance, said the smoking ban was needed to protect park-goers, especially children, from secondhand smoke. But park-goers and little children who picnic near golf courses or sidewalks, BEWARE! You’ll breathe the dreaded second-hand smoke while you barbeque and play batmitton.
"Something needs to happen for the health of our community," Sheedy is quoted as saying. The expert Sandy Sheedy must know what is best for our health. Her City of Sacramento Biography explains: Before her election to the City Council, she served on the Sacramento County Civil Service Commission; the Sacramento City Planning Commission; and on the Board of Directors of the Stanford Settlement, the Sacramento Association for the Retarded, and the Camellia Orchestra. She is a lifetime member of the NAACP and serves on Sheriff Lou Blanas' Community Advisory Board as well as the Police and Sheriff's Memorial Foundation Board of Directors.
As a City Planning Commissioner, professional board sitter and resume builder, Sandy Sheedy appears eminently qualified to make health decisions for Sacramentans.
If Sandy Sheedy is sincerely interested in the health of our community rather than this vote-getting farce, perhaps she should work to drum up renewed interest in the forgotten proposed leaf blower ban. The exhaust that comes from leafblowers is far more dangerous to Sacramento residents than the second hand smoke that disipates quickly in large city parks thanks to our Delta breeze. If it is air pollution that Sandy Sheedy is so concerned about, she and the City Council need to check their facts.
Sacramento City Council members are buying into the scare mongering former Surgeon General Richard Carmona employed when he implied that you could drop dead from the slightest wiff of cigarette smoke. Carmona abruptly quit just a month after he released his controversial report on the dangers of secondhand smoke. Reason Magazine writer Jacob Sullum, in an article about the Surgeon General’s hype about secondhand smoke, offered this: “Whether smoking bans are a good idea is a question not of science but of values, of whether we want to live in a country where a majority forcibly imposes its preferences on everyone else or one where there is room for choice and diversity.” Sandy Sheedy and Mayor Fargo should heed this line of thinking.
Citizens for a Quieter Sacramento reports that there are more than 20,000 people in the city of Sacramento with asthma or other respiratory diseases that can be aggravated by the dust clouds raised by leaf blowers. About a third to a quarter of the support for a leaf blower ban comes from those concerned mainly about air quality. Sacramento's air is among the nation's worst.
The Current Leaf Blower Ordinance states: Blowers are allowed between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sundays. The noise level, as measured 50 feet from the blower, cannot exceed 70 decibels (dBA) for blowers acquired before November 1995, or 65 dBA for blowers acquired after that time. Violations can be reported to the city at 264-5948.
In my neighborhood for example, the leaf-blowers arrive before 8:00 am and don’t stop until after 6:00 pm, Monday through Sunday. The blower-operators blow right up next to houses, windows, cars, and blow the garbage onto plants & shrubs, against windows and onto cars. That’s more offensive than anyone smoking in a park.
Leaf blower motors are inordinately large emitters of CO, NOx, HC, and PM. Two-stroke engine fuel is a gasoline-oil mixture, thus especially toxic. Particles from combustion are virtually all smaller than PM2.5. According to the Lung Association, a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars. "It's sad to see workers with leaf blowers and ineffective dust masks blowing ashes and pollutants back into the air," commented Janie Davis, President and CEO of the American Lung Association of San Diego. "This is an unhealthful practice for workers and neighbors."
Nearly ten years ago in 1998, the Sacramento City Council's Law & Legislation Committee (Council Members Heather Fargo, Steve Cohn, Robert Kerth, and Darrell Steinberg) discussed leaf blower regulation but made no final decisions. The hearing's most significant outcome was that the issue would be revisited in six months to which I can find no further evidence of anything happening.
Sacramento Environmental Commission (SEC), an advisory body, had developed an eight-point list of recommendations for improving enforcement of the City's current leaf blower restrictions. These included educating the public and lawn care industry about the City's current ordinance, enforcing the noise limits (something not currently done), and eliminating the higher limit on older blowers. City staff, however, advised against any enforcement of noise limits, stating, "enforcement of dBA limits is not practical in actual field practice." They also pointed out that over the last year they had only received 125 complaints about leaf blower noise, a number they consider insignificant.
City Staffers considered 125 complaints about leaf blower noise insignificant? Who on the City staff decided that more complaints would justify such a ban? That is a pitifully weak excuse for not making a decision. But then again, we pay these people to avoid decision-making.
Local Landscape Architect Steven Dailey added his two-cents to this argument in a letter opposing leaf blowers to the Citizens for a Quieter Sacramento: “Leaves, twigs, bark, nuts, flower, fruit, pollen, animal and insect waste all contribute to the parent material which decomposes to form healthy and usable topsoil in our gardens. This continual soil building process is necessary to sustain the health of all living, growing things. The leaf blower indiscriminately removes all friable topsoil, parent "litter" and mulch leaving only the hard-packed subsoils. True gardeners won't use them. As a culture, we spend millions annually to replenish what we have removed from the earth, in the form of manufactured mulches and fertilizers.”
If that's not enough absurdity for one City Council decision, the city will post no-smoking signs in at least eight of the city's larger community parks at a cost of about $16,000. It hasn't been decided if signs will be placed in additional parks. An $8,000 public information campaign will be launched, noting the smoking restriction in park permits and other mailings. …$24,000 of useless signage and mailings - such wasteful squandering. Another costly, worthless, incompetent, useless proposal.
The Sacramento Bee reported on the one sane voice in the argument: City Councilwoman Bonnie Pannell, who represents south Sacramento, said she did not want to see vital police resources going to a crackdown on smoking scofflaws.
"I can just hear it now, people saying that (police) can't respond to something else but they'll respond to complaints of smoking -- I can't support that." Ms. Pannell is correct on the inane proposal, however the police will not respond to complaints of smoking. With the high crime in Sacramento, they’re already busy with gangs and criminals.
In a report prepared by the California Air Resources Board for the State legislature in January 2000, the cover-your-bum report avoided every possible clarification of the health risks of leaf blowers. Since then, the matter has been dropped statewide.
Whispers of racism are heard whenever the subject of banning leaf blowers is brought up. Professional activists from the liberal left claim that “people will lose their jobs,” and landscaping services will go up in cost.
There are currently twenty California cities that have banned leaf blowers, sometimes only within residential neighborhoods and usually targeting gasoline-powered equipment. Another 80 cities have ordinances on the books restricting either usage or noise level or both. Other cities have discussed and rejected leaf blower bans. Citizens for a Quieter Sacramento's volunteers interviewed 14 of these cities in October 1997 (Belvedere, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Carmel, Claremont, Del Mar, Indian Wells, Laguna Beach, Lawndale, Los Altos, Malibu, Mill Valley, Piedmont and Santa Monica), with a combined population of more than 350,000, to learn more about how their bans were working. (Since 1997, bans in Hermosa Beach and West Hollywood, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, and Sunnyvale have been enacted).
The cities reported that the bans were easily enforceable, there were no reports of landscapers going out of business and the citizens were 100% satisfied and positive about the success of the bans.
If the Sacramento City Council really is interested in an ordinance that will help the air pollution problem in our city, forget the No Smoking ban absurdity and revisit the leaf blower ban. What we weary voters want is for our City Council to just do something worthwhile; enact ordinances that actually have an positive impact on the majority of the citizens, and stop advancing ludicrous issues for a mere minority of the population.
Perhaps Ms. Sheedy’s next worthwhile ordinance proposal should be protecting park-goers and children from the grown men who publically urinate in the park and while on the golf course. While not dangerous to your health, public urination is more offensive to most people than someone publically smoking. But I digress.
