This Friday, April 21, 2023, Santa Cruz’s Parks & Recreation Department’s maintenance crew will be on site at City Hall to demonstrate the use of battery-powered landscape tools for

Yesterday, California kicked off an incentive program to help commercial landscapers purchase new zero-emission leaf blowers, lawn mowers, hedgers, and other ZE landscape tools and batteries.

But we couldn’t find any comprehensive studies that compared the cost of buying and operating new battery-powered leaf blowers with the cost of running gas-powered ones. So we rolled up our sleeves and ran the numbers ourselves.

…The law will only affect the future sale of new gas-powered tools. It’s still up to cities and towns to pass their own local ordinances to restrict the use of them while we still live and breathe.

AB-1346 would require all new ones to be zero-emission (e.g. battery/electric) by 2024

Happy new year from C.H.A.S.E.! As of January 1st, residents of Monterey began enjoying somewhat cleaner air and less noise, but the new ordinance is full of holes—the gas leaf blower ban excludes commercial and industrial zones, parks, schools, and more, where plenty of people work, study, and exercise. And last we checked, noise and […]

Even as many of us at C.H.A.S.E. are following and engaging with national issues and politics, we haven’t neglected the local. It’s where we live and breathe. Lately we’ve been accelerating education and outreach to help reveal the costs of gas-powered leaf blowers and the benefits of kicking them. For instance, some people think gas-powered […]

A big welcome to all the new residents who have signed up to support this cause. We know the proportion of people who want action on this is overwhelming, but it’s only when people step forward and demand change that we will see that change, and bring peace and cleaner air to Santa Cruz. So […]

The wildfires bathed Santa Cruz in ashes. Now leaf blowers are blowing dangerous ash back and forth around the neighborhood. When will City Council say, Enough?

But now that the pandemic has forced so many people to work from home (or worse, put them out of work), many more people are stuck at home during the week. They, too, are forced to live among the leaf blowers. They’re realizing that the whining, revving, obnoxious cacophony isn’t something that comes and goes in 15 minutes—it rises up here, and there, and everywhere, invading our houses and our heads over and over, near every day, as one crew after another fires up another blower to do war on … leaves.