Through the first four months of the year, Rye police issued just two summonses for the use of gas-powered leaf blowers, both in March. But in the first month after the city shifted from seasonal restrictions to an outright, year-round ban on gas blowers, that number skyrocketed.
The ban took effect May 1, and that month, police issued 78 summonses. It’s still too soon to say how landscapers and residents will adapt to the new rules in the long term, especially once the leaves start piling up again in the fall. But conversations with communities that implemented bans years ago provide a glimpse at what Rye can expect in the months ahead.
From April 2025 to April 2026, the 12 months before Rye’s ban was implemented, city police issued 511 summonses for gas-powered leaf blowers. Larchmont, an early adopter of a ban on gas-powered blowers back in 2022, had just 29 summonses over that same time frame.
The village instituted a ban four years before Rye, which likely goes a long way in explaining why it had 95 percent fewer citations. But Larchmont officials also credited a public education campaign for getting residents to buy in from the beginning.
“Our Environmental Committee had done such an amazing job with education,” said Larchmont Mayor Sarah Bauer, “that most residents were actually asking for the ban.”
The village positioned the decision as a public health and environmental justice issue. Given the pollutant emissions of gas-powered leaf blowers, along with excessive noise exposure, Larchmont residents decided it wasn’t justifiable to put health on the line for short-term benefits.
Irvington stressed similar points, assembling a Green Policy Task Force when it banned gas blowers in 2023.
“Personally, I think the village has never looked better,” task force member Anne Altman told The Record, three years after the ban took effect. “It’s not only the elimination of constant noise and air pollution, but things are allowed to grow.”
Leola Specht, a member of the Irvington task force’s steering committee, said, “more and more people just change to a more ecological landscape practice.”
Of course, it’s not all rosy, even in communities generally pleased with their results. Many professional landscapers oppose the bans, saying less effective equipment could increase their costs, rates, and the time it take to finish a job. Those same arguments peppered Rye City Council meetings as well.
Irving Reyes, who owns Reyes Lawn Care & Landscaping in Long Island, told The Record the cost of his services has increased ever since the village of Southampton banned gas-powered blowers. He said his employees have since adapted to electric blowers, which he called less efficient, but said there has been an exodus of landscaping companies in Southampton that would not, or could not, afford to switch to electric alternatives.
“There’s less variety of who you can choose to service,” Reyes said. “I think the small guys got pretty much wiped out.”
To help combat those unintended consequences, New York state introduced an Electric Landscaping Equipment Rebate Program, sponsored in the State Assembly by former Rye mayor and current Assemblyman Steve Otis.
The bill passed both the State Senate and the State Assembly in late April. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, it would require the state to provide point-of-sale rebates, or immediate discounts, to institutions and commercial landscapers buying electric landscaping equipment.
It remains to be seen how Rye’s ban will affect local landscaping companies. Any business asked to break from its longtime practices is bound to be hesitant, as evidenced by Rye’s 78 summonses in May.
But Nancy Adams, a township committee member from Maplewood, N.J., who was a leader in passing a ban in her community, is optimistic about Rye’s future.
“Your residents will be safer, the workers will be safer,” she said. “Everything will be healthier. And there will still be a profession out there that is able to maintain yards the way they’re expected to be maintained.”
