At the end of last year, Riverside trustees agreed to pursue an educational campaign on the environmental and noise impacts of gas-powered leaf blowers with the goal of phasing them out over the next two years. At the time, the village board acknowledged such a ban could negatively impact landscaping businesses that operate in town.
But one resident worries a potential ban could have unintended consequences.
Tom Lupfer, president of Lupfer Landscaping and former president of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association, aired his concerns to the village board during public comment at their Feb. 20 meeting. He told trustees he worried implementing the ban could have unintended effects that harm small businesses more than bigger companies and push them to use alternatives that are worse for the environment and for public safety than the gas-powered blowers.
“They didn’t have the information they needed to start down this road,” Lupfer told the Landmark in an interview. “It sounds like a great idea upfront, but when you look at all the issues that are involved, it quickly becomes a quagmire.”
At the meeting, he said banning gas-powered leaf blowers would allow large landscaping corporations to monopolize Riverside; while these companies would be able to afford to convert a trailer’s worth of equipment to battery-powered leaf blowers, smaller companies would not. He said medium-sized companies would be likely to leave town and seek business in other communities where they can use their existing equipment while small, local businesses that only operate in Riverside would be forced to use loopholes to stay in business.
“The real problem comes with the small companies, the Hispanic-owned companies. They have no idea that this is going to come. They’re not tuned into the village’s e-flashes; they don’t follow the local news,” he said.
Lupfer said he thought it likely these small companies would face fines from ordinance violations before switching their equipment out — not to battery-powered blowers but to riding lawn mowers.
“One backpack blower will use less than a gallon [of gas] a day, where those big mowers use over five gallons a day, so the carbon footprint just skyrockets. It’s an amazing increase in fuel usage,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, because these small companies don’t have a big territory, so they can’t just move to the next town. This is their business, and it really, really affects them.”
He said larger companies may even call in code violations on small companies, compounding the issue. Lupfer also said he worried about the potential for escalation if employees at these small companies are discovered to be undocumented immigrants.
Public Safety Director Matthew Buckley told the Landmark that Riverside police are not currently enforcing immigration laws in accordance with Illinois and Cook County. He said they would only assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers if they had a valid warrant, which they would treat the same as any other warrant.
If a code violation were to be enforced following a potential ban, Buckley said, that would fall to a code enforcement officer rather than a police officer.
Assistant Village Manager Ashley Monroe said Riverside staff have taken Lupfer’s public comment into account, as “the question is still on the table” for village officials.
“Some of the things that he had shared were a little bit new, and most of it was other information that we’re aware of and that we’ve been considering over time,” she said.
She said staff and the village board have sought examples of effectively implemented bans in other communities to see how a ban could work in Riverside. She said one method would be through changing the village’s noise ordinance.
“We don’t have anything that specifies landscaping versus construction versus general noise offences. Do we want to break that out into these different pieces, or do we just make changes to the hours?” she said. “Other communities have implemented certain types of exceptions for community special events or other clean up after a disaster. We have a great deal of those within our existing code, but it would be an expansion of certain special circumstances where you might want that to be allowed.”
Monroe said enforcement of a ban would be difficult, as village staffers would be required to witness a code violation before issuing a citation.
“We can’t just take a phone call from someone saying, ‘Well, it was done on this day.’ We have to have some type of observation in order to be able to testify when it goes to adjudication,” she said. “That’s the challenge.”
She said that future efforts to reduce Riverside’s carbon emissions, which will be included in an upcoming draft of the village’s climate action plan, could focus on incentivizing residents and businesses to move toward greener practices rather than punishing those who don’t or can’t make the change. She said Riverside might even consider buying its own stock of battery-powered leaf blowers so residents can exchange their gas-powered equipment.
“I think from Riverside’s perspective, the board is, based on their last discussion, willing to observe and see how things are progressing in our general region,” she said. “They may still opt to make a change, but, overall, I think the emphasis [is] on encouraging and educating the community about the benefits of this rather than taking a more punitive outlook.”
