The City Council unanimously voted to ban gas-powered leaf blowers year-round in Rye, capping off two impassioned public hearings and years of stop-and-start discussions around the issue.
Gas-operated leaf blowers, and particularly their excessive noise, have become an increasingly hot topic around town. The issue has proven contentious inside City Hall as well as the council’s public hearing to consider an outright ban continued last Wednesday, dragging on for hours.
The debate again drew dozens of residents and landscapers from across Westchester on the heels of a similar turnout when the public hearing was opened last month. Ultimately, the new council voted to back a ban on gas leaf blowers and set the law to go into effect on May 1.
The most recent iteration of the law was passed in November 2022, limiting the use of gas-powered leaf blowers to spring and fall cleanup seasons — March 1 to April 30 and Oct. 1 to Dec. 15. However, the expectation at the time was that the topic would be revisited as alternative electric leaf blower technology improved.
Those in support of the new legislation framed the debate as a quality-of-life issue, primarily concerned with the excessive noise of gas leaf blowers. Resident William Dailey, a lawyer who sometimes works from home, described gas-powered leaf blowers noise as a “thorn in the side of basically everybody in my family.”
Some have also highlighted the environmental impacts of gas equipment.
Landscapers, however, and some homeowners who opposed the ban, continued to argue that electric leaf blowers do not have the requisite power necessary to clean up residential yards and public spaces across the city — not to mention the additional cost of the equipment.
Across two council meetings and in conversation with The Record, landscapers suggested that using less-efficient electric blowers would increase yardwork costs and pose additional fire risks, due to their use of lithium-ion batteries.
Daniel Greto, a Rye resident and president of Central Tree Service, told the council that the ban was “not about progress, it’s about unintended consequences.”
Council members, too, were impassioned in their defense of the ban. Councilwoman Jamie Jensen, a Democrat, expressed frustration that those opposed to banning gas blowers — whom she referred to as the “experts in the room” — seemed unwilling to compromise.
“We need you to help us make the right change,” she said, adding that leaf blowers had been talked about in town since at least 2010.
Jenkins said it was her civic duty to represent Rye residents who were suffering from a serious quality-of-life issue over noise and felt the urge to act now.
“We need to have the conversation of what it looks like to retool and retrain,” she added.
Councilman Keith Cunningham, a Republican, wondered aloud whether the ban would actually lead to a quieter Rye. Landscapers have indicated that they would need to use multiple electric blowers simultaneously to make up for the loss of the more effective gas-powered ones.
“Two leaf blowers at 70 decibels is tremendously noisier than one leaf blower at 80,” Cunningham argued during his lengthy comments.
But in the end, he voted alongside his Democratic colleagues on the council. Newly installed Councilwoman Emily Padilha Baldwin, who was sworn in prior to the public hearing, abstained from the vote.
Mayor Josh Nathan, a Democrat, told opponents of the new legislation that “we’re giving you more freedom and more flexibility” because it permits the use of multiple units of other types of gas-powered equipment on a single lot — language that is vague in the current law.
Because the new law won’t take effect until May 1, and the current law already bans all gas leaf blowers outside of the spring and fall cleanup seasons, landscapers essentially have until Oct. 1 to make preparations for the groundbreaking shift.
With an outright gas leaf blower ban now on the books, Rye joins the ranks of other Westchester communities, including Mamaroneck, as well as towns and cities across the U.S.
“It’s long overdue,” Nathan said.
