IT'S NOT JUST THE NOISE, BUT THE POLLUTION.

Byline: KARL FLEMING Local View

I write this on a Monday, and I don't have to look at a calendar to know that. I know because a leaf blower is blaring in the backyard of the house behind me.

I can tell what day it is by which leaf blower at what house is blasting the silence. On Tuesday, it's the one next to the one behind us, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday it's one across the street. Saturday it's one next door to the north and another catty-corner behind us. Sometimes three or four are blaring at once at nearby houses.

We've lived where we are for 35 years and ours is a quiet old West Los Angeles neighborhood, or used to be, before the giant new box houses and the leaf blowers came. People used to mow their own lawns. But virtually every house now has a weekly mow-blow-and-go gardener, so there is little peace and quiet anywhere -- except on Sundays.

But it isn't the noise that's my most serious objection to leaf blowers. It's the air pollution.

According to the Air Quality Management District, one common backpack leaf blower emits as much pollution in a year as 80 new cars. The state Air Resources Board tells me that 7 percent to 8 percent of our entire air pollution comes from gas-powered gardening tools.

Is this a big deal? It is for me.

For one big thing, I'm a serious asthmatic. The whole of Los Angeles, in fact, has rising asthma rates, especially among children, and all experts, as well as plain common sense, say that dirty air is a serious culprit.

How many loud gas-powered leaf blowers are there in use around Los Angeles? The AQMD says the number in the Southland is about 50,000. That's a lot of smog, noise and dirt.

And the thing is, they're against the law. That's right. The Los Angeles City Council outlawed them on noise grounds in 1998, prohibiting their use within 50 feet of a household, with violations carrying a $251 fine.

This is a law, though, rarely enforced, because of lobbying from the companies that make leaf blowers, and pressure from organizations representing the thousands of gardeners who use them.

The gardeners have my complete sympathy. I know they are struggling to get or keep decent places to live, to buy clothes and to feed their families.

``It's all about money,'' says Barbara Alveraz, past president of the California Landscape Contractors Association. ``The average homeowner does not consider a gardening service highly skilled work and does not want to pay a lot more money for it. So for Joe Gardener to scrape a living, he has to do a lot of yards and that means mow, blow and go.''

What this means is that if gardeners were to surrender their leaf blowers, they'd have to raise their prices considerably.

For myself, I've long since told the hard-working guys who do our yard to stop using the leaf blower. And I pay them commensurately.