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Healdsburg Today • Tue, Mar 24 |
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One of the most important city meetings of the year happens tomorrow, Wednesday March 25—a special meeting of the City Council called a “goal-setting session.” It won’t be at the usual City Hall location, however, but at the clubhouse at Tayman Park, the golf course on the edge of town. |
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But it will be an official City Council meeting nonetheles, called to order by the Mayor and following Brown Act and the usual rules of order procedure (although it’s a bit loose on the procedure, based on previous experience). It is unclear if this will be live-streamed as other council meeting are, so attendance is recommended.
The meeting includes two open public comment discussion periods, one toward the beginning and one at the end. Expect the first period to include a pitch for a ban on gas-powered leaf-blowers, spearheaded by former mayor Leah Gold. She coordinated a petition signing campaign a few months ago, and intends to present it to the council tomorrow morning.
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Is this a leaf-blower or a personal helicopter? (Photo Amazon.com) |
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Continued:
“The State of California banned the sale of gas-powered blowers as of January 1, 2024, because their inefficient engines are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. But that doesn’t prevent their use,” Gold pointed out. “If Healdsburg joins the hundreds of municipalities across California and the US who have banned their use, we can hasten the transition to cleaner, quieter electric devices. And improve our quality of life!”
Among those hundreds of municipalities Gold mentions is the City of Sonoma, which underwent a lengthy and sometimes contentious battle several years ago—in fact the ban was approved by their city council in 2016, ten years ago, well before the state law banning the sale of gas-powered blowers. (Full disclosure, in my previous life as a community reporter in Sonoma, I covered the story as here.) To some extent that effort was publicly led by Darryl Ponicson, the author of The Last Detail, who lived in Sonoma at the time. He later wrote a novel about the experience, Eternal Sojourners, a surreal fable of a mythical town faced with a demonic plague of leaf-blowers. It certainly resonates with Sonoma—and Healdsburg, for that matter. |
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Surrealism aside, leaf blowers in general kick up pollen and other particulates that are health-threatening irritation to people and pets, create noise pollution that disturbs wildlife as well as serenity, use fossil fuels ineffectively, and are loud enough (and dirty enough) to adversely affect the people using them, often landscapers and gardeners. While electric blowers still have some of those problems, they are certainly quieter; raking is quieter still, and a good upper-body workout.
“What bothers me about the state bill, as I read the broad strokes, is that the sale of these polluting noise-makers will be banned, but not the use of them,” Darryl Ponicsan told this reporter in 2021. That’s the loophole Gold’s petition seeks to close at the civic level.
The goal-setting session tomorrow morning runs from 9am to 4:30 pm, and its discussion will resonate throughout the City Council’s 2026-27 year. That makes it one of the most important meetings of the year.
— Christian Kallen
News Editor, The Healdsburg Tribune |
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