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 are 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 supports several elements of the amendment, including seasonal regulation, an immediate prohibition on municipal use, and an eventual city-wide prohibition.
However, we find several key aspects absent or deficient and in need of revision:
- The glacial timeline to both commence and complete the transition to more sustainable landscaping
- Absence of any weekly regulation
- Omission of any restrictions on sales of gas-fueled leafblowers
- Dubious enforcement provisions
See additional details on each objection below.
1. The proposed timeline is far too slow
As currently written, the amendment takes absolutely no action on gas leafblowers for three years (until 2028), which is an unconscionable delay, and then doesn’t actually prohibit them until 2033 — eight years from now! As a Nature Conservancy manager and long-time ecological activist, Council member 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. There is simply no compelling public interest in taking so long to act.
In addition to the public health effects of gas leafblowers’ excessive, building-penetrating low-frequency noise, which already surpasses the city’s legal sound limits, Sec. 12-133 of the ordinance delineates 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.
A representative of the mayor testified at a February 5th Environment Committee hearing that the deadline for completing the transition should be advanced, but only by two years — to 2031, or fully six years from the introduction of the ordinance. This is a step in the right direction, but it still should not take six years to finally rid Providence of the toxic emissions produced by incompletely burning a mixture of gasoline and oil (and spilling some portion of it each time they‘re re-fueled).
A timeline that reflects broad public-health concerns rather than narrow commercial interests would commence the municipal prohibition and seasonal regulation on Jan. 1, 2026 — two years earlier than currently proposed — and implement the total prohibition on gas-burning leafblower use no later than Jan. 1, 2028 — five years earlier than 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.)
These examples of putting the interests of business owners — most of whom do not live in Providence, and thus 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 oil and gas development at the federal level: Once businesses invest money, they invariably assert the need to seek a return on it. The illogic of allowing continued gas leafblower sales — which will inevitably spur calls for further delay in ending their use, due to the “sunk” costs of equipment purchased after the ordinance’s enactment — must stop now.
4. A lack of meaningful enforcement provisions
As currently written (Sec. 12-136), the amendment lacks meaningful enforcement provisions.* Anyone violating the amended ordinance would receive a warning from the Department of Inspections and Standards 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 with leafblower regulations in many other U.S. jurisdictions.
The city’s notoriously lax enforcement of many of its own laws, regulations, and policies (such as overnight parking, and especially those related to noise) makes it difficult to imagine the new leafblower regulations will somehow be taken any more seriously — especially If enforcement resides with the 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 enforcement concerns, we urge the amendment sponsors to add a requirement that the city issue an annual public report to the Environment Committee beginning on Jan. 15, 2026, indicating the level of compliance by both residents and commercial landscapers, including the number of citations issued for violations of the ordinance, and the number of those citations that are either dismissed or paid. The City Council cannot continue to ignore the laws it proposes once they are enacted.
If the annual city report indicates widespread non-compliance with leafblower regulations, the ordinance must to amended to allow residents to submit time- and location-stamped video of gas leafblower violations as legally admissible evidence of an infraction — and require the Providence Police and Municipal Court to treat footage that meets the amended ordinance’s violation criteria to be treated as prima facie evidence of infractions for the purpose of issuing citations.
But even if justified citations are consistently issued, the current $100 fine seems unlikely to deter commercial landscaping companies, which may consider the value of lucrative landscaping work with illegal gas leafblowers to be worth the risk of such a low penalty — especially if (as with most noise-related violations) enforcement relies on a low-priority municipal response to resident complaints.
To increase woefully lacking deterrence, there should be an escalating fine schedule, with $200 for the third offense (assuming one warning), and $300 for each additional violation, which may curtail the “Russian roulette” of deliberate commercial violations. Current penalties that are low enough to be considered just another “cost of doing business” will do little to deter wanton disregard for the amended ordinance, much less the health and well-being of city residents.
We appreciate that the Providence City Council finally resumed consideration of long-overdue leafblower regulation, and want to make clear our support for doing so. That said, we think the opportunity to address the issue is too important to allow enthusiasm for some degree of regulation to be co-opted into support for any regulation. Municipal legislation worth drafting, debating, and passing must be substantive and effective, and not get subsumed by the very process that creates it.
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* The proposed amendment would not supersede Providence’s existing — and utterly unenforced — gas-fueled leafblower regulations, which prohibit 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.