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 Council members 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 appreciated Councilmember 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 were 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 further delayed in the final version passed by the City Council.
2. Absence of any weekly regulation — gas leafblowers can still be used seven days a week, giving residents no respite from their toxic emissions, including noise.
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, and the ordinance is case study in the structural non-enforcement.

Based on these and other glaring flaws in the 2025 ordinance amendment, the Noise Project did not support it as originally drafted or ultimately passed, and seeks amendments to the ordinance to make it fit for its ostensible purpose. See further information on each of our objections below.

1. The timeline is preposterously slow

As finally passed, the 2025 ordinance takes absolutely no action on gas leafblowers for over two years (until 2028), at which point it regulates only city employees and contractors; delays any restrictions on landscapers and residents — the primary source of gas-leafblower emissions — until 2030, and still doesn’t actually prohibit them until 2033 — nearly eight years after its introduction!

We condemn both the delayed implementation of seasonal restrictions and eight-year timeline as an unconscionable delay in regulation and prohibition, and thus a willful perpetuation of the adverse health and environmental effects that the ordinance itself cites as its reason for enacting.

In addition to the public health effects of gas leafblowers’ building-penetrating low-frequency noise, which already surpasses Providence’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 self-identified environmental activist, Councilmember AnderBois clearly knows that every year that 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.¹

Simply put, it still should not take nearly eight 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).

Prior to the City Council Environment Committee’s September 2025 vote to approve the revised amendment, AnderBois stated that she was trying to balance the interests of the public and landscapers, but the ordinance’s eight-year timeline clearly fails to do that by allowing a relatively small number of non-resident landscapers to counteract the far broader public interest of city residents.

Moreover, the original version of her amendment prohibited the use of gas-fueled leafblowers by city workers and contractors once it came into effect, but the revised version actually allows them to continue until 2033, thereby squandering the opportunity to lead by example — similarly unbalancing the public interest.

A timeline that actually balances broad public-health and environmental interests with narrow commercial ones would have brought the ordinance 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 an Autumn window 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, and by the start of the current ordinance’s initial restrictions.

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

The ordinance not only perpetuates the original’s lack of effective enforcement provisions (see Sec. 12-136),² but allows a property owner who either personally violates the restrictions or allows a landscapers to do so in the first year (2030) to receive only warnings for their first three offenses!

That effectively makes the cost of the first four violations $25 each. And each subsequent act of non-compliance is subject to a $100 fine per violation, with no escalation for subsequent offenses, in perpetuity. This contrasts sharply with leafblower regulations in most other U.S. jurisdictions.

Given the city’s notoriously lax enforcement of its own laws, regulations, and policies — ranging from modified mufflers to the many other sources of excessive and unhealthy noise — it is difficult to imagine how the new leafblower regulations could possibly be taken any more seriously.

Moreover, the amendment assigns leafblower enforcement to the city’s Department of Inspections and Standards, which isn’t widely present in the community or easily contacted, especially on weekends, which are the days of heaviest leafblower use by residents.

---

To address these and other enforcement concerns, the Noise Project has urged amendments 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 accept footage documenting violations of the ordinance as prima facie evidence of infractions for the purpose of issuing citations.

A high rate of verified violations in 2030 (the first year of public 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 enforcement of laws after it enacts them, or the effects non-enforcement produces. All laws are an intended as means to an end, not merely ends in themselves. Passing an ordinance should not be seen as the completion of the Council’s effort to address issues of public interest, but the beginning. The effects of legislation should match its intent, and in that regard, the City Council’s woeful leafblower ordinance is a failure before it even kicks in.

The Noise Project was initially hopeful when the Council finally undertook long-overdue regulation of gas leafblowers, but ultimately disappointed that widespread support for reasonable limits on their use has instead resulted in largely performative ones.

Municipal legislation worth drafting, debating, and passing should be substantive and effective, and serve the broad public interest, not that the narrow personal aspirations of those who create it.

_______________

¹ In fact, Providence’s sustainability director 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 by two years — to 2031, or fully six years from the introduction of the ordinance.

² The amendment does 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.