This article was updated on Feb. 3 at 12:30 p.m.
Tensions surrounding gas-powered leafblowers over noise and air pollution have been simmering in Rye for years — but now they appear to be reaching a boiling point.
With the City Council considering proposed legislation that would ban gas-powered blowers outright beginning May 1, residents and business owners showed up at a recent City Council public hearing to make their opinions known.
Landscaper, gardeners, and outdoor works spoke against the ban. “You just can’t do it. It’s impossible to do. It’s just impossible,” Peter Balsamo, owner of Mamaroneck-based Peter Balsamo Landscaping LLC and a professional landscaper for over 35 years, told The Record.
Most of those supporting the ban said that disruptive leafblower noise was their primary concern.
Leslie Winters said she called Rye police about leafblower violations 446 times from 2015 to 2025.
“Noise travels,” Winters asserted at the hearing. “It has destroyed neighborhoods.”
Several residents also spoke about environmental and health concerns associated with gas-powered lawn equipment.
Donna Providenti, a member of the city’s sustainability committee, cited a letter written by Sarah Evans, an Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai professor whose research focuses on the impacts of early life environmental exposures, which was addressed to the City Council.
Providenti explained that leafblowers “relaunch dust, pollen, pesticides, mold, and heavy metals into the air, right where children play and walk.” She also spoke from the perspective of a small business owner. She described how she, too, has confronted unwelcome changes in the law, but that her business eventually benefited from them.
“The truth is, we wouldn’t have made those changes on our own,” Providenti said. “Sometimes, legislation is what ensures progress.”
A local law on the books permits quieter electric leaf blowers year-round, while limiting gas-powered leafblowers to the spring and fall cleanup periods, March 1 to April 30 and Oct. 1 to Dec. 15, respectively. That law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2023.
Those speaking in opposition to a full ban on gas blowers, including Balsamo, all made the same argument: When it comes to the spring and fall cleanup periods, electric leaf blowers are simply not up to the job.
Balsamo put it simply at the council meeting: “You might as well use a hairdryer.”
Electric blowers are sufficient in the summer, Balsamo explained, when there aren’t many leaves on the ground. But in the spring and fall, leaves get wetter and heavier, which has only worsened as the seasons have shifted. The electric blowers just can’t move them effectively, landscapers argued.
Landscapers found some support among Rye homeowners. Tom Kanos, who has spoken on this issue at Council meetings before, wondered if “we’re starting to delve into depriving people of their personal liberties because of derangement about the noise.”
Larry Wilson — a landscaper of 35 years who operates Lawrence Landscape Design in Yonkers and served as the former president of the New York State Turf and Landscape Association — told The Record that not only would the ban significantly increase the cost of buying, maintaining, and replacing electric equipment, but landscapers would be forced to spend more time on each yard, increasing a business’s overhead.
That cost would eventually land on the customer, warned Wilson, who also attended the public hearing.
“We have employees, we have insurance, we have a lot of overhead,” he said. “And we have to have a certain amount of work per day to be profitable … this definitely is going to slow us down.”
Wilson estimated this could double the cost of yard maintenance; Balsamo thought it might triple. One landscaper even suggested they might not be able to operate in Rye if a gas ban was passed.
Most of the landscapers at the City Council meeting and in conversation with The Record said that businesses operating legally were facing punishment for the behavior of unlicensed landscapers. Instead of banning a piece of equipment they view as essential, many suggested that Rye should instead better enforce the law that already exists and focus on requiring workers to have the proper credentials.
Landscapers also expressed concerns about: the effect a full gas ban could have on drainage citywide, if workers don’t have the time to pay attention to the streets and curbs bordering the yards they work on; electric blowers’ use of rechargeable batteries, which have been known to start fires; and overall equity, when a licensed landscaper won’t use a gas-powered leaf blower while their neighbor’s unlicensed one does.
Similar bans on gas-powered leafblowers have been passed elsewhere in Westchester, including Scarsdale, White Plains, and Mamaroneck, but Balsamo said the gas blowers are still used regularly in those communities.
People are “taking a chance with getting a ticket,” he said.
The proposed legislation in Rye would include a $250 fine for a first offense, $1,500 for a second offense, and $2,500 to $10,000 for a third offense.
In 2025, Rye police doled out a record 586 leaf blower summonses, according to department data.
The council chose not to debate the issue on Wednesday night, instead agreeing to continue the public hearing on Feb. 11. This, Democratic Mayor Josh Nathan explained, allows more people to speak on the issue and grants the council more time “to consider all the different things you’ve said, ’cause that’s why you elected us.”
In the past, Nathan has indicated his own support of banning gas-powered leaf blowers, as have Democratic council members James Ward and Amy Kesavan.
Balsamo, for one, is concerned that those who legislate his livelihood don’t have the lived experience to truly understand the scope of the issue.
“The people that come up with these laws, they work in cubicles,” Balsamo said. “They don’t know what’s going on out here. We live out here. Our whole lives are out here.”
