City should be tougher on noise pollution.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Jerry Oltion For The Register-Guard

The City Council could make Eugene a much more pleasant place to live. Instead, the council is poised to punt.

On Tuesday evening the council will discuss the city's noise ordinance and debate whether to change it, but the changes the council proposes will do practically nothing to reduce the noise pollution in our town.

Here's the good news: It wouldn't take much to turn the council's proposal into a model of civic responsibility.

This whole issue came about in response to complaints about leaf blowers and mulch blowers. If you spend any time at all outdoors, you know it's a rare day when you don't hear someone blasting away at their lawn with an artificial hurricane created by a chainsaw engine and a fan strapped to their back.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. The last couple of decades have seen leaf blowers, power washers, weed whackers, edgers and a host of similar yard-care tools become ever more prevalent. In recent years mulch-blowing trucks have increased the din even more. People are now hiring landscape services to pump mulch from a truck parked in the street all the way around their house to the backyard. That requires an immensely strong blower motor, which produces a noise like a hundred leaf blowers all running at once.

This kind of noise is more appropriate for an industrial zone than a residential neighborhood. People can't enjoy their backyards anymore. It's getting so loud we can't have peace and quiet inside our houses, either.

Last summer, after enduring half a dozen mulch-blowing trucks and almost daily barrages from leaf blowers and power washers, I asked my city councilor, Betty Taylor, if the council would do something to stop it. She proposed banning leaf and mulch blowers.

The City Council debated it during a work session last August, but the ban quickly died for lack of support from the other councilors.

The council discussed various other suggestions for revising the noise ordinance, and eventually settled on the useless idea of adding leaf blowers to the list of machines that can't be used at night. The proposed changes also limit the amount of noise a leaf blower can produce. But that limit (70 decibels) is way too loud, and it's waived for single-family residential use anyway.

This is what's known as a token effort.

Yet such an ordinance could really shine if written properly. Current muffling technology allows leaf blowers to run at 65 decibels. That doesn't seem like much less than 70, but every 6 decibels represents a doubling in noise, so 65 is nearly half the racket of 70. Sixty-five decibel blowers are available, so that's what the law should require. And it should provide an incentive for future improvement by lowering the required level by 2 decibels per year until it reaches 57, which is widely accepted as a tolerable noise level for residential areas.

Mulch-blowing trucks should be given a similar technology-appropriate limit, and a similar timetable for reducing noise to an acceptable level.

The yard care industry will complain that these levels are too strict, that the new rules will drive people out of business, and so on. That's what people said in the 1960s when we began to clean the smog out of our air, but we required steady improvement, and most of the industries that generated smoke reduced their emissions and survived just fine. Those that couldn't meet a reasonable standard for pollution did shut down, and it's a good thing they did.

I have no desire to drive anyone out of business. I wish everyone in the yard care industry well, but I want them to understand that when they run a noisy machine in my neighborhood, they're making money at my expense, and I'm asking them to reduce that expense to an acceptable level or stop doing it.

If enough of us ask council members to make that the law, they will. The time to do it is at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the City Council Chambers on Eighth Avenue and Pearl Street. Show up at 7:15 to sign up to speak. Those testifying get three minutes to make their statements, but they really need to say just one thing: Give us a law that actually provides peace and quiet, rather than a token effort that will change nothing.

Jerry Oltion of Eugene is a writer and longtime advocate for environmental quality.