On Nov 22nd, 2023, a few members from Arlington zoomed with delegates Hope and Sullivan who confirmed they were introducing the bill and said they would file it with the Division of Legislative Services by the deadline of Nov 30th. They recommended we contact the Virginia Association of Counties (VaCo) and the Virginia Municipal League. They said VaCo would favor local over state control. It is unlikely we will get rid of the Dillon Rule, but we may chip away at it. What may help the bill pass is to underline the local freedom aspect. A locality should be able to decide for itself if gas leaf blowers are a problem and then act or not as they see fit.
On Nov 14th, the Arlington County Board held a public hearing on their legislative program for the General Assembly (GA). An Arlington member spoke before the Board, and read the following:
My name is ….resident of Cherrydale, and member of Quiet Clean Northern Virginia. (QC NOVA)
QC NOVA has been working with Virginia Assembly Delegates Rip Sullivan and Patrick Hope on legislation that would give Arlington and other Virginia localities the freedom to manage our own affairs with respect to regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. Alexandria Delegate Elizabeth Bennett-Parker and Fairfax Delegates Holly Seibold and David Bulova have indicated interest in joining the effort.
I request that the Arlington County Board include support for such a bill in its 2024 General Assembly legislative package.
Gas-powered leaf blowers are seriously harmful –
- to the health/well-being of the users,
- to the health/well-being of those in proximity (even inside their residences),
- to wildlife (from pollinators to birds),
- to our air quality,
- and even to our climate.
- The harms are scientifically documented, not imaginary.
Gas-powered leaf blowers are used year-round for mostly unnecessary tasks such as blowing grass clippings into our gutters, and are extremely bad news for Arlingtonians!
Noise: The September 2021 Consumer Reports says all of the gas-powered leaf blowers they recently tested emitted noise of 85 decibels or ABOVE at the ear of the operator. All battery-powered leaf blowers tested emitted noise BELOW 85 decibels. Eighty-five decibels is the threshold at which the World Health Organization and the US EPA say hearing is damaged. Children have smaller ear canals than adults, which intensifies higher frequency sounds. Studies show loud noise interferes with students’ learning. Lawn & garden equipment is typically used on school grounds while school is in session. Not to mention that studies have also shown an impact of excessive noise on mental health!
Climate: Gas-powered lawn & garden equipment consumed 3,074,662,000 gallons (over 3 BILLION gallons) of gasoline in 2021, according to the US Department of Transportation https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2021/mf24.cfm — a shocking 30.52% of all Private and Commercial Non-highway Use of Gasoline! Of that, Virginia represented 3.2%.
Pollution: Gas-powered leaf blowers, edgers and trimmers typically have inefficient 2-stroke engines that use a mixture of gasoline and oil for lubrication. About a third of the fuel is released unburnt in the emissions. There’s also a lot of fuel spillage.
Toxins: Emissions from gas-powered leaf blowers include known carcinogens, including benzene, butadiene, acetaldehyde, and formaldehyde.
Smog: For a commercial gas-powered leaf blower, one hour of operation emits smog-forming pollution comparable to driving a new light-duty passenger car about 1100 miles – about the distance from Los Angeles to Denver, over 15 hours of driving, according to the California Air Resources Board. Northern Virginia (District 8) is a marginal non-attainment region for smog.
Destruction of our Arlington biosphere: The noise and the blasts of air not only harm birds and pollinators; they also impact our soil health – something you all have recognized in our new storm water regulations.
To be clear — we are NOT at this point asking you to ban gas-powered leafblowers. We are asking you to support a bill in Richmond that would enable localities such as Arlington to prohibit or otherwise regulate the blowers – or not – as the citizens of those localities see fit.
Just this morning, a Cherrydaler posted on our Listserve an ironic tweet with which I will close.
“….Deciduous trees spend all Spring taking nutrients out of the soil to make leaves, which photosynthesize all Summer and Fall. When the cold comes, those leaves fall… All across this great land, people proceed to fire up specialized machines literally called “leaf blowers”, which burn irreplaceable fossil fuels, pumped out of the ground at great expense, to produce, in addition to carbon monoxide and noise, powerful blasts of forced air. They blow the leaves into immense piles, and then rake them into huge bags made of polyethylene, a byproduct of fossil fuel refinement which will take longer to decompose than the geologic processes which produced the fuel to begin with; a very, very long time. These bags full of leaves are then loaded onto trucks which, burning fossil fuels, move them to giant areas called “landfills” — where the leaves, trapped in plastic, undergo anaerobic decomposition, and, rather than releasing their nutrients back into the soil, turn to slime and sulfurous gasses. This entire process means that, wherever modern humans congregate, the soil quickly becomes impoverished, as the nutrients required for cyclic leaf production are removed, rather than stored in the ground, producing a kind of grey, dusty soil that when I was a professional gardener we immediately recognized and referred to as “blower disease”. It is all so astonishingly pointless and debased and wasteful.”
Thank you for your attention.
On Oct 6th, the Arlington group met with Arlington County board member Takis Karantonis at 9:30 AM at 2100 Clarendon Blvd.
The meeting lasted an hour and went pretty well. Takis was very interested in the issue and in broader aspects such as getting noise recognized officially as a pollutant which could open up regulatory possibilities and in helping small landscaping companies to compete with the large commercial ones. He is on board with most of what was suggested but sees some pitfalls related to Virginia state procurement laws and federal regulation of products on the market. We kept coming back to what the Board has the power to do now in terms of education/cajoling and to the point that most leaf blowing is absurdly unnecessary.
August 10, 2023 QC NOVA Arlington Meeting (by Zoom) with VA Delegate Patrick Hope and Bismah Ahmed, Vice President of Government Affairs, VA for the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington (AOBA).
Participating for Quiet Clean Northern Virginia:
Avril Garland (on behalf of her daughter who is an Arlington resident)
Jim Klein
Margaret McKelvey
Cullen Ruff
Gary Usrey
David YaffeThe meeting was a follow up to an earlier meeting with Hope in April where he had expressed interest in co-sponsoring a bill in Richmond to allow localities to regulate gas-powered leaf blowers and interest in urging local Arlington businesses to go electric. Hope invited Ahmed given her role with AOBA and her previous experience lobbying in Richmond.
While Hope reiterated his commitment to co-sponsoring a bill with Delegate Rip Sullivan (who has also reconfirmed), both Ahmed and he were pessimistic about success unless there is a change in political representation in Richmond. She suggested that amending the local noise ordinances might be a more successful effort in the short term. Note – this is something that we have also heard from retiring delegate from Fairfax, Kaye Kory, who had introduced a bill in our behalf in 2022. As Gary Usrey pointed out, enforcement of noise ordinances is a nearly impossible challenge.
We spent most of the meeting discussing what incentives there might be for “nudging the market” as Hope put it. Ahmed was very supportive of the idea of an educational effort with members of AOBA and would be happy to have help from QC NOVA in designing outreach to the AOBA membership, focused not only on the harmful impact of gas-powered leaf blowers and other landscaping maintenance equipment, but also on the futility and wastefulness of using leaf blowers to clean dirt and grass clippings off of sidewalks. Jim Klein was eloquent on the absurdity of spending money to blow dirt around. She even thought that the idea of some kind of prize/award for an AOBA member that took action to to electric might have merit.
With regard to the ideas of setting up a green banking program to help businesses finance a transition to electric, and of giving tax incentives (as favored by the National Association of Landscape Professionals), Hope suggested that Richmond might be persuaded to offer a tax-free day(s) for purchases of electric landscape maintenance equipment modeled on the tax-free weekend for back to school purchases.
Hope also reiterated his April statement that he would be prepared to write letters to the various large landowners in Arlington such as the Virginia Hospital Center and George Mason University. Elise Bean had drafted a letter for him after the April meeting that we will re-send to Hope’s office.
April 14th, in-person meeting with Va Delegate Patrick Hope
Avril Garland, Gary Usrey, and Elise Bean met Del Hope at the Silver Diner. Hope represents a good chunk of Arlington in the Virginia House. He was very supportive of the idea of legislation that would permit localities in Virginia to regulate gas-powered leaf blowers but recommended that Delegate Rip Sullivan be the one to actually introduce legislation in the 2024 session; Hope would then sign on as a co-sponsor. In the course of the conversation, Hope agreed to try to set up a meeting with AOBA (Apartment and Office Building Association) to encourage them to switch to electric leafblowers. Elise subsequently chatted with State Senator Barbara Favola and she indicated she’d be happy to participate too if the timing works. The trio undertook to provide Hope with a draft letter(s) that could be sent to large landowners such as Inova and George Mason and to local news outlets – the theory being that something with a delegate’s name on it would be more likely to get published and would have more clout. Ted Craig agreed to take a crack at beefing up the “facts/myths” page that is on our website with an eye to carefully countering the various arguments that we often hear for allowing gas-powered blowers to persist. Margaret McKelvey, who had set up the meeting with Hope, undertook to again contact Delegate Sullivan who had so far not responded to our request to meet with him.
- May 3rd, 2023, in-person meeting with Delegate Rip SullivanQC NOVA members Gary Usrey and Margaret McKelvey met with Va Delegate Rip Sullivan at Sullivan’s office (at the law firm of Bean Kenny and Korman, P.C. 2311 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201) to:
- (1) enlist his support for legislation in Richmond that would give localities such as Arlington the freedom to create their own ordinances regarding gas-powered leaf blowers, and (2) encourage him to use his contacts and position to press the Arlington County Board and large landowners to require electric tools when letting new contracts for landscape work. Sullivan is both supportive of our efforts and pragmatic about what can be accomplished in Richmond in the 2024 General Assembly session unless the Democrats hold the Senate and take the House and unless the governor would agree to sign such a bill.
- We gave Sullivan a fact sheet on the harms of gas blowers as well as the text and history of the unsuccessful Kaye Kory 2022 bill and the sample letter that Elise Bean prepared for Delegate Patrick Hope to consider sending to large landowners such as the local hospitals and universities.
- Sullivan is an experienced legislator – he was first elected in 2014 – so we talked mainly about how to game a strategy and messaging, how to line up allies and marshal arguments in favor of the power to regulate gas-powered leaf blowers well in advance of the 2024 session. Gary noted that Delegate Patrick Hope was very supportive of our position and would be happy to co-sponsor a bill if Sullivan would take the lead in introducing the legislation. Sullivan asked about the dynamics around Kaye Kory’s bill (e.g., was there strong opposition or just insufficient interest/urgency?) and looked up who the five delegates were who voted to table the bill in committee and who the four who supported the bill. Sadly, the five are among the most conservative in the General Assembly and likely to remain in office and some of the four will no longer be in office; it would be a challenge, but not impossible, to persuade some of the “nays.” Sullivan noted that he had not begun to plan yet what bills he might push in the 2024 session — should he be re-elected in November — but he is supportive and will most certainly talk with Del. Hope about the possibilities.
- Sullivan recommended that we seek to enlist the support of the Virginia Municipal League (VML) and the Virginia Association of Counties (VACA). QC NOVA has already corresponded with both over the last two years, but has not yet been able to secure face to face meetings with them. Action item – pursue such meetings. As we discussed costs of going electric, Gary mentioned the meetings that he and Ted Craig had last year with the local lobbyist for the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) which favors incentives such as rebates and tax breaks rather than bans as a way of pushing the transition to electric. Sullivan suggested that support from NALP during a legislative hearing would be very useful in supporting our effort. It would be most effective to get individual delegates as allies, but having organizations such as VML and NALP as allies is also very useful. The Chamber of Commerce and the Virginia Small Business Council are two other suggestions for seeking support and/or seeking to forestall opposition. VML and VACA might be willing to support on the basis of their distaste for the Dillon Rule which limits their own parochial power interests. Sullivan even mused that Gov. Youngkin might be willing to support regulating gas blowers in order to claim to be an environmentalist while undercutting all other climate action. Action items – reconnect with NALP, connect with the Chamber/Small Business Council, and attempt to pin down more specifics on costs of going electric/return on investment time frames.
- Note — It is important to continually stress that we are not currently asking for regulation of or a ban on leaf blowers in Virginia; we are merely asking for freedom under the “Dillon Rule” for localities to be able to address the leaf blower issue as those localities see fit. Any debate over limiting/banning the use of gas-powered blowers would take place at the local level, not at the state level. In practice, however, the potential for future regulation at the local level pushes people in the General Assembly toward having a debate over blowers at the state level, hence the need to be prepared to address the various objections/questions likely to arise. Additionally, it will be important to message that we are talking about a transition period — probably three years as DC did and as corresponds to the average lifetime of a gas blower — rather than a hard start.
- Gary asked whether there might be funds available to Virginia from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) to help fund a transition from gas-powered to battery-powered landscaping. Sullivan noted that the IRA was geared more transportation but it would be worth exploring with regard to some kind of eventual incentive scheme to help landscapers transition to electric.
- Sullivan also agreed to talk to Arlington County Board members about using their contract authority to require electric landscaping tools.