City Delays Leaf Blower Ban Until July
The Santa Cruz City Council on November 19 voted to delay the implementation of the gas leaf blower ban which they had approved by 7-0 in June. The ordinance, which had been set to take hold in January, will now be delayed to July 1.
We are highly disappointed with this decision. The human health costs of delay are much bigger than the concerns cited by the City to justify the setback.
To recap this latest delay, the city learned that the LEEP program incentives which provide discounts on battery-powered landscape tools will not be available to residents (i.e., consumers) after a city’s ordinance takes effect. Rather than make another push to publicize it in the months leading up to January 1, the City held off on the outreach which the council’s June ordinance directed them to do—and then at the November meeting cited the minimal time remaining as a reason for delaying the ordinance.
Anyone who walks our city’s neighborhoods can see that very few homeowners use gas-powered leaf blowers anymore. Nearly every time one is fouling the air we breathe there’s a landscape company’s truck out front. That’s because consumer-grade battery blowers have been highly affordable for years, and a resident doesn’t need multiple batteries to do their own yard.
What’s more, it’s small business owners which council members had expressed concern for in the phase-out of gas-powered tools, not homeowners—which is why our group put so much effort into lobbying for and then publicizing those commercial incentives. The city’s ordinance would not put a pause to those at all—they will still be available after the ordinance goes into effect.
But the sunset of the residential rebates prompted the City to put the brakes on the whole thing.
Policy decisions are always a matter of trade-offs. Delaying the entire ordinance so an unknown number of relatively affluent homeowners can continue to access a government incentive—which has been available for over a year—puts a small value on the health and other impacts which moved the council to pass the ordinance in the first place.
The City’s own Climate Action Plan calls for them to start phasing out all “small off-road engines” in 2024, a class which includes the very dirtiest engines in landscape maintenance, construction, and other sectors. This setback means the City will blow past their own deadline to get started on even one of these, the gas-powered leaf blower, maybe the dirtiest one of them all.
We won’t repeat here all the costs to health, clean air, equity, and workplace safety we’ve been stressing for years now. At times it seems like our City staff and leaders understand—their messaging on climate action and health in all policies sparkles with support for leadership and action. (How many times have you heard, “Santa Cruz is a leader on …”? Our map shows all the California cities that have done this already, many of them years ago.)
And then we see those priorities fall at the feet of a footnote in an incentive program. The subsidy that was designed to grease the wheels of the transition to a cleaner city is wrapped around the axle and putting that transition farther into the future.
As the new date for implementation of the ordinance approaches—July 1, 2025—will the City ask the council to consider yet another delay or even the repeal of the ordinance?
We need to be ready to stand up and show up, in person, at any such future council meeting.
Please stay tuned for updates. And thank you all for your continued support.
