We oppose performative leafblower laws

In late 2024, Providence City Council member and Environment Committee chair Sue AnderBois (Ward 3) introduced a proposed amendment (47724) to regulate the use of heavily-polluting gas-fueled leafblowers and similar landscaping equipment in the city. The amendment co-sponsors were John Goncalves (Ward 1), Helen Anthony (Ward 2), Miguel Sanchez (Ward 5), Ana Vargas (Ward 7), Althea Graves (Ward 12), and Council President Rachel Miller (Ward 13).

The Noise Project appreciates City Council member AnderBois’ willingness to address noise and other toxic emissions and their adverse effects on residents, landscaping workers, and the environment, and supported several elements of the original amendment, including seasonal regulation, an immediate prohibition on municipal use, and an eventual city-wide prohibition.

However, we found several key aspects absent or deficient and in need of revision, and are disappointed that none of them was subsequently remedied despite nearly eight months of input and discussion that remained opaque to everyone but the amendment sponsors. These are:

1. The unconscionably glacial timeline to transition to more sustainable landscaping, the start of which was moved up by a year in the new version passed in the first vote by the City Council
2. Absence of any weekly regulation — leafblowers can still be used seven days a week
3. No restrictions on sales of gas-fueled leafblowers — creating an even bigger stockpile of heavily polluting equipment that only serves to encourage further delays in transitioning
4. Glaringly deficient enforcement provisions — Regulations are only effective if they’re enforced

Based on the largely unchanged content of the leafblower ordinance amendment that the full City Council passed 8–3 on its first vote on Oct. 2, 2025, the Noise Project cannot support it as currently written. See the details of each of our objections below. The second vote was scheduled for Oct. 16.

1. The proposed timeline is preposterously slow

As originally written in 2024, the amendment took absolutely no action on gas leafblowers for over two years (until 2028), which was recently shortened by one year to 2027, and still doesn’t actually prohibit them until 2033 — nearly eight years after its introduction!

We welcome the accelerated implementation of the seasonal restrictions, but the overall timeline remains the same and as such continues to represent an unconscionable delay in a total prohibition, and thus a perpetuation of the adverse effects that the amendment itself makes clear.

In addition to the public health effects of gas leafblowers’ building-penetrating low-frequency noise, which already surpasses the city’s legal sound limits, Sec. 12-133 of the ordinance delineates multiple other health and environmental impacts that require urgent action — including the toxic emissions generated by their dirty two-stroke engines (e.g., nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and VOCs), which affect the health of both the landscaping workers using them and surrounding residents, to say nothing of the broader municipal air quality and sustainability of local ecosystems.

As a Nature Conservancy manager and long-time ecological activist, Councilmember AnderBois knows that every year that environmental action is delayed dooms people and ecosystems to irreparable harm, and merely rewards those whose sole stance is opposing any and all efforts at sustainability.

In fact, a representative of Providence’s mayor testified at the Environment Committee’s initial hearing on the original draft of the amendment in February 2025 that the deadline for completing the transition should be advanced even further, by two years — to 2031, or fully six years from the introduction of the ordinance.

This is obviously a further step in the right direction, but it still should not take six years to finally rid the city’s residents, landscaping workers, and environment of the toxic emissions produced by incompletely burning a mixture of gasoline and oil (and spilling some portion of it each time they‘re refueled).

AnderBois stated prior to the Environment Committee’s September 2025 vote to approve the revised amendment that she was trying to balance the interests of the public and landscapers, but her insistence on retaining the amendment’s eight-year timeline fails to do that, as supporting the relatively small number of PVD-based landscapers is not a sufficiently countervailing public interest.

Moreover, the original version of her amendment prohibited the use of gas-fueled leafblowing equipment by city workers and contractors, but the revised version actually allows them to continue doing until 2033, thereby squandering an opportunity to not only lead by example, but further curtail the adverse effects. That is hardly balancing the interests of small business.

A timeline that actually reflects broad public-health and environmental concerns rather than narrow commercial interests would have brought the ordinance amendment to a full City Council vote by Spring 2025, commenced a prohibition on city agency / contractor use of gas-burning leafblowers on Jan. 1, 2026, banned their commercial sale (see below) and restricted their use to the Fall as of Jan. 1, 2027, and implemented a total prohibition of gas leafblower use no later than Jan. 1, 2028 — five years earlier than currently proposed.

2. Seasonal regulation, but no weekly limits

In addition to the seasonal regulation of gas-leafblower use, it should also be further regulated on a weekly basis — specifically, prohibited from use on Sundays and all state and federal holidays, to spare Providence residents from exposure to the noise and other toxic air pollution on at least one of their weekend days off per week, and during important events such as Columbus / Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving, and celebrations such as Diwali. Landscaping is hardly so urgent that it must interrupt these opportunities to spend quality time with family, friends, neighbors, and community members.

3. No restrictions on the continued sale of gas leafblowers

The unnecessary delay in implementing the eventual prohibition on gas-fueled leafblowers is made even worse by the fact that there is no prohibition on sales of gas blowers during the entire eight years that residents and especially commercial landscaping companies would be allowed to continue using them.

This sadly echoes the city’s schizophrenic and counterproductive willingness to continue to permit both sales and installation of modified mufflers, the use of which is already prohibited under both Providence municipal code and Rhode Island law. (We are unaware of any other product that is illegal to use but not to sell and install.)

Putting the interests of landscaping business owners — most of whom do not live in Providence, and don’t suffer the adverse effects of gas-fueled leafblower use in the city — above the health and well-being of residents (to say nothing of effective public policy and basic common sense) only serves to promote further cynicism regarding who city government actually serves.

Allowing eight more years of gas-fueled leafblower sales in Providence is similar to the folly of allowing further fossil-fuel investment at the state level: Businesses will invariably assert the need to a return on such investments. Continued gas leafblower sales will simply spur calls for further delay in ending their use, due to the “sunk” cost of equipment purchased after the ordinance’s enactment. Landscaping businesses are well aware of the transition to electric tools, and must act accordingly.

4. A lack of meaningful enforcement provisions

AnderBois’ revised amendment also continues to perpetuate the original version’s lack of effective enforcement provisions (Sec. 12-136).* A property owner who either personally violates the ordinance or allows a landscaping company to do so would receive a warning on the first offense, and each subsequent act of non-compliance would be subject to a $100 fine per instance of violation, with no escalation for subsequent offenses. This contrasts sharply with leafblower regulations in many other U.S. jurisdictions.

The city’s notoriously lax enforcement of many of its own laws, regulations, and policies — ranging from overnight parking to the many other sources of excessive and unhealthy noise — makes it difficult to imagine the new leafblower regulations will somehow be taken any more seriously.

Moreover, the amendment assigns enforcement to the city’s Department of Inspections and Standards, which isn’t easily contacted or widely present in the community on a broad scale or on the days of heaviest leafblower use by residents, such as Saturdays and Sundays.

To address these and other enforcement concerns, the Noise Project has urged amendment sponsors to add a requirement that the mayor’s office submit an annual public report to the Environment Committee beginning one year after the seasonal restriction commences, indicating the level of compliance by both residents and commercial landscapers, including the number of both warnings and citations issued for violations, and ratio of the latter that are later dismissed rather than paid.

We also recommended that the ordinance allow time- and location-stamped video of gas leafblower violations to be submitted as legally admissible evidence of an infraction — and require the Providence Police and Municipal Court to treat footage that meets the ordinance’s violation criteria as prima facie evidence of infractions for the purpose of issuing citations.

A high rate of verified violations beyond the first year of seasonal restrictions would indicate a lack of deterrence, and should result in the automatic implementation of an escalating fine schedule, with $200 for the third offense (assuming one warning), and $300 for each additional violation.

The City Council cannot continue to ignore the executive branch’s implementation and enforcement of municipal laws after it enacts them, or the results it yields. Laws are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. Voting to pass an ordinance should not be seen as the completion of the Council’s effort and responsibility, but the beginning. The effects of legislation should match its intent.

---

The Noise Project appreciates that the Providence City Council finally undertook long-overdue leafblower regulation, but is concerned that widespread support for some degree of regulation has too easily resulted in support for any regulation. Municipal legislation worth drafting, debating, and passing must be substantive and effective, and not be eclipsed by the very process that creates it.

_______________
* The proposed amendment would not supersede Providence’s existing — and completely unenforced — gas-fueled leafblower regulations, which prohibit the use of such equipment at sound levels above 55 decibels in residential zones or above 65 dB elsewhere between 8:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. (or at any hour when it can be heard at a distance of 200 feet), the latter of which is merely a reiteration of the city’s equally ignored noise ordinance.