Let me be perfectly transparent: I love a lawn. I love my lawn. During my Manhattan-commuting years, pulling into the driveway and seeing that velvety green expanse was a balm, an antidote to the day’s air-conditioned banality. Lawns signify more than just grass; they’re a Norman Rockwell-coded page in the visual language of the American Dream. Dads mowing in shirtsleeves, a dog named Fido, cartwheels, catch, daisychains, a Rocket Pop.
In New Canaan, where a competitive, Town & Country version of that dream prevails at all times, lawns matter. We all went to good schools and got good jobs so that we might have too much yard to reasonably maintain ourselves, and we outsource the whole business so our weekends can unfold without the looming to-do-list-item of turf management. If our yards offer passersby a snapshot of our psyches, a perfect lawn signals an orderly household where everyone eats enough protein and tests ahead of the curve. A messy one means that, obviously, somebody’s spending time in prison.
All this to say: I get the desire for a good-looking yard. What I don’t get is the wild scramble to preserve a cheap, unhealthy, and environmentally destructive way of achieving it. Yet that’s exactly what the folks seeking to overturn the Town Council’s seasonal restriction on gas-powered leaf blowers are doing. I can already predict the 600-word ire of this comment section, but I have a lifelong inability to keep my mouth shut when something reasonable is falsely portrayed as tyranny.
Let’s do this.
The Legislation
On May 20, New Canaan’s Town Council voted 8-4 to limit the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. Drafted over months, with rounds of input from the public and members of Town Council, the ordinance is a seasonal restriction, not a permanent one, with exemptions for emergencies, storm cleanup, and town employees. It also remains legal for residents to use their own gas-powered leaf blowers on hard surfaces like patios and driveways. The rule aims to make New Canaan a healthier, calmer place to live in the summer.
Says Hilary Ormond, the ordinance’s author and chair of Town Council’s Bylaws & Ordinances Committee: “People have been asking that we do something about leaf blowers since I first ran for Town Council in 2021; it’s been on my radar for a long time. And while I hoped the free market or the state would make enacting a local ordinance unnecessary, public requests to do something really escalated this year, so I thought it was time to put pen to paper and drafted something for my colleagues to react to and debate.”
Some History & Context
Much of New Canaan’s behind-the-scenes work is done by appointed volunteer boards and commissions. The bipartisan, five-member Conservation Commission, whose remit is the town’s open space and natural resources, began studying gas-powered leaf blowers in 2020. Per current member John Fusek, the Commission has supported restrictions three times: in 2022, 2024, and 2026, unanimously each time, under both Republican and Democratic chairs.
Once the issue reached the Town Council, the public weighed in en masse: more than 200 emails (reportedly more than any topic has generated in five years), the majority in favor of restrictions. If you’ve ever tried to have dinner on your patio at 6 PM on a summer evening, you’d understand why.
Similar seasonal bans, most of them far more prohibitive than ours, have already been enacted in Greenwich, Westport, Norwalk, Bedford, Scarsdale, Mamaroneck, Pound Ridge, Rye, and Stamford. The Village of Larchmont banned all gas-powered leaf blowers, 365 days a year, in 2020. The point: this isn’t a fringe philosophy; it’s a thing responsible governments do, and New Canaan is trailing its neighbors.
The Referendum
Within a week of the vote, opponents, including the owner of a local landscaping business (shocker), filed a Notice of Intent to Petition. The ordinance went on hold pending a referendum, and leaf blowers droned on.
The referendum is here, and it goes to a vote on Saturday, July 25th. The exact question on the ballot: “Shall the May 20, 2026 action of the Town Council approving an ordinance entitled ‘Gas Powered Leaf Blowers,’ which sets certain restrictions on their usage, be upheld?”
If you want the restriction, vote YES. If you do not, vote NO.
Here’s why I’ve concluded YES is the way to go.
The Argument Against Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers
The thing about science is it’s not the Tooth Fairy. You don’t get to choose whether you believe in it; empirical truth comes for you whether it affirms your personal and political beliefs or not.
The evidence against gas-powered leaf blowers is monumental. Popularized in the 1980s as an alternative to hosing down driveways in drought-ridden California, the backpack-style devices use two-stroke motors that dump up to 30% of their fuel unburned into the surrounding air and water, making them among the dirtiest combustion engines in existence. A 2011 Edmunds study found that one consumer-grade leaf blower emitted 23 times the carbon monoxide and nearly 300 times the hydrocarbon emissions of a Ford F-150 Raptor pickup. To match a half-hour of leaf blowing in hydrocarbon output, you’d have to drive that truck nearly 4,000 miles. And before anyone tells me the study is old: the fundamental architecture of a two-stroke engine hasn’t changed a whit. They still burn oil mixed into their fuel, still lack catalytic converters that detoxify exhaust, and still send plumes of benzene, a known human carcinogen, into the air unchecked. Google it; it’s gross.
To match 30 minutes of a gas-powered leaf blower’s hydrocarbon emissions, you’ld have to drive a Ford F-150 Raptor from New Canaan to LA, and then back to Denver. To be fair, there is now a Kawa Ni in Denver.
In California, small off-road engines (read: lawn equipment) already produce more smog-forming emissions than all light-duty passenger cars combined. The state banned the sale of new gas-powered leaf blowers as of Jan. 1, 2024.
“But California is full of hippies and socialists!” the pro-blow crowd might crow. While that may once have been demographically half-accurate, my beloved home state tends to run ahead of the curve on consumer protection. California passed Proposition 65 carcinogen warnings in 1986 and data privacy rights in 2018, decades before the federal government acted. As for the hippies, what we’re talking about here is hard data, not which version of “Dark Star” is observably superior.
Two-stroke motors are abysmal, and to go to bat for them is a bizarre way to spend your precious time on God’s green earth, which gets us to the grisly health part of the gas-powered leaf blower’s legacy.
Respiratory Risk
Here’s something I didn’t know: Fairfield County has the worst air quality in Connecticut, and we’re among the 25 worst counties in the country, earning an F from the American Lung Association for ozone. I’d expect some of that with the territory—relative population density, highways, and sitting downwind from the country’s biggest city. But that doesn’t excuse the impulse to double down on the dirtiest possible way to move a few leaves around.
Along with a high concentration of known human carcinogens, leaf blowers emit particulate matter fine enough to lodge permanently in lung tissue; think chewing gum on a sidewalk. According to research presented to the Conservation Commission this past April by Dr. Sarah Evans, a Fairfield-based researcher in pediatric environmental health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the fine particulate matter produced by lawn and garden equipment across Fairfield County alone equals the annual output of 1.28 million cars.
Last year, 50 days here were classified as unhealthy for sensitive groups, including children, and still, we sent the crews out to rev their two-strokes seven days a week, from 6:58 AM until last light. In a town where children’s health is a stated priority (remember revising school start times and the West School cell tower debacle?), it seems to follow that we’d curb the one thing that makes a simple summer day impossible for kids to enjoy outdoors without considerable respiratory risk.
Turns Out, Noise Is a Public Health Issue
Then there’s the noise, which researchers like Dr. Evans have stopped treating as a mere nuisance. Chronic exposure to unpredictable bursts of low-frequency sound that penetrates walls and doesn’t decay is associated in peer-reviewed studies with doubled rates of depression and anxiety. It can also cause an increased risk of atrial fibrillation, hypertension, stroke, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Women and young people are particularly susceptible.
Same two machines, both times. The decibel scale is logarithmic, which means it quietly compresses a hundredfold difference into a twenty-point gap. It is the only reason anyone can say “they’re both loud” with a straight face.
You could point out here that electric leaf blowers aren’t silent, and you’d be right. But the two types of sound were not created, nor do they travel, equally. Let me put on a science teacher hat (if only because it has earflaps, and a neighbor’s yard guys just started up) and get into some noise math.
Decibels aren’t linear; they’re logarithmic. This means that every 10-point increase registers to the human ear as a doubling in loudness. At the operator’s ear, a gas-powered blower typically operates at around 95 decibels; an electric one is closer to 75 decibels. That 20-point gap means the gas model is perceived as four times louder, while producing 100 times the sound energy. Yes, you can find a spec sheet for a consumer-grade gas leaf blower with quieter output, and I’m sure some boardroom theatrics might convince you that some electric models are noisy. But it’s the way the sound travels that matters most.
Gas engines emit a low, droning frequency that permeates walls and windows and still exceeds the World Health Organization’s outdoor noise limit, even at 800 feet away. Electric motors whine at a higher pitch that dies off quickly and can’t travel through walls: two machines, same job, not remotely the same effect.
If a homeowner is okay with all of the above risks, the neighbor sitting in his backyard, the woman on a work call, and the infant going down for a nap didn’t consent.
A gas leaf blower on a two-acre lot is not a private choice. Its sound reaches roughly 46 acres — twenty-three times the property it’s standing on, and about twenty households who never agreed to anything.
The Part Nobody’s Actually Talking About
All the incontrovertible health data above will only go so far before it’s swatted away by a grotesque, modern cynicism: “If it’s not my family or me being exposed to this risk, I don’t care.”
I have words for this attitude. Not a single one of them is printable.
And now we’re at the rotten center of it all: a glib okayness about the offsetting of human costs. In the majority of cases in New Canaan, we outsource our picture-perfect yards to interchangeable crews of guys, usually from Central America, whose names we don’t know and whose cardiac and respiratory health we’ve apparently priced well below our own. Incidentally, federal data puts the health uninsured rate for grounds and maintenance workers at over 23%, higher than the rate for people with no job at all.
And that’s where the American Dream falls off a (manicured) cliff.
So, what is the argument for a gas-powered blower? Well, they’re cheap and omnipresent—the Temu, if you will, of landscaping solutions. A commercial backpack model runs a few hundred dollars, guzzles pump gas mixed with oil from a jug in the truck bed, and can be run into the ground and replaced without ceremony. The business model works only because the true costs (the emissions, the hearing loss, the cardiovascular strain on everyone within 800 feet) are quietly borne by someone else.
Just like nobody asks how a $12 sweater got to be $12, nobody questions how the $85 weekly mow-blow-go stays so low. The answer in both cases is the same: don’t confuse a dollar amount with a price, friendo. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it, and in this case, that someone is the guy wearing the two-stroke engine on his back. And, to a still meaningful degree, you, your neighbors, and your kids.
I can Spidey-sense a wariness of governments telling us what toys we can and cannot have. The word “overreach” gets tossed around quite a bit, much as it was when Congress tried to ban child labor in 1916 or when seat belts became mandatory in the 1980s. Aversion to change is an expected human response. But there’s simply too much data here, and too much of it points to irrevocable harm done to children, to mistake a seasonal restriction for a jackbooted assault on your personal liberty.
I mean, come on.
Are Electric Leaf Blowers Perfect?
No, but they’re a vast improvement on their gas-powered cousins. Yes, batteries need charging, which draws on fossil fuels; the mining of battery minerals can be problematic; run times are limited. We have two electric leaf blowers at our house, and we can tackle our two-plus acres with both fully charged, though not with one alone. But the point of progress (again: American dream) isn’t perfection. It’s a steady drumbeat of improvement. And across every measure, an electric leaf blower improves upon its gas-powered predecessor.
Also worth noting: it’s extremely likely that your landscaper already owns electric equipment, because their teams use it on the properties they serve in Westport, Greenwich, Bedford, Pound Ridge, and Norwalk.
Do we really want to be the final dumping ground for an outmoded technology?
Lawns: A Reality Check
There’s a valid argument for calming down about leaves in the summer months. The July 4th storm notwithstanding, my yard sees very little debris between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and I actually like to get after it with a rake, telling myself that raking builds core strength, if not character. Worried about your tennis court? Get a pushbroom. Come October, lawn crews will bring out the big dog, that giant industrial fan on rollers, and nobody’s coming for that. The Town Council intentionally set the restriction to sunset on Labor Day, earlier than most peer towns, precisely to leave fall cleanup alone.
And the brutal environmental truth is that lawns aren’t the glorious personal asset we think they are. I can’t bring myself to get rid of ours, but I’m ever more aware of the harm. Lawns require obscene amounts of water to keep alive and function as ecological dead zones. They can’t sustain the food web that native birds and beneficial insects need, and the neonicotinoid pesticides we spray on them are a documented driver of pollinator collapse. When you need to prop up your yard with an entire system of commercial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, many of them known carcinogens, the question is worth asking: how far are we willing to go for a faulty snapshot of our own perfection?
George Ault. Lawn chemicals are bad for your pets. So is blowing them around indiscriminately with gas-powered leaf blowers.
The Feelings Fight
I suspect a few people just aren’t going to calm down, because this referendum is pretty clearly about feelings, and I understand this historically histrionic era well enough to know better than to bring logic to a feelings fight. There’s big talk among the opposition that New Canaan residents deserve a say in this change, and sweeties, we’ve BEEN saying. Twelve people were elected to our town’s chief legislative body to make decisions like this one. They’ve heard our in-person input and read our emails. They’ve deliberated and decided. Which is, interestingly enough, what the post-buzzer opposition’s own remedy concedes: they don’t allege a violation or a rigged process, because there wasn’t one. They just lost the vote and want a bigger room.
But I’m not sure they’re playing fair, honestly. This past weekend, many residents were text messaged spam push surveys full of pro-leaf-blower disinformation, with no disclosure of who sent them. People don’t resort to desperate, deceptive tactics like that unless they’re a little hot under the collar.
In a way, I’m grateful to be part of a deeply engaged citizenry; even the simplest shifts in town policy meet scrutiny here, and that’s not a bad thing. As Hilary Ormond said, “If leaf blowers are the biggest problem New Canaan has, then we live in a pretty great town.”
In the interest of fairness, I combed the referendum crew’s website for valid arguments, and they make two worth discussing. One is enforcement; while I can foresee a learning curve among residents and an initial uptick in calls to the police non-emergency line, uncertainty about how this will play out isn’t a good enough reason not to try. People will get used to new laws the way we get used to new ideas: gradually, and with grumbling that eventually wears off. I don’t think the NCPD gets a lot of calls about people smoking cigarettes in restaurants anymore, you know?
The other quibble is the lack of a phase-in, which would be a genuine consideration were this a year-round ban. It’s seasonal, so it’s fair to consider season one the phase-in. Educate people properly on the restrictions, the carveouts, and the penalties. Give them warnings, and follow warnings with action. We need to give ourselves a chance to try it out, wear it in, and get it right collectively in time for next year.
The rhetoric that cues the Liz Lemon-iest eyeroll from me, however, is the assertion that larger properties, specifically the 4-acre zone, deserve an exemption from restrictions altogether. You know, that old “it’s my Downton Abbey, I’ll do what I want” chestnut. I can concede the point only halfway: among our peer towns, Greenwich does treat big lots differently. Its gas blower ban runs from the Friday before Memorial Day through September 30, unless you’re on two acres or more, in which case you’re sprung September 1st.
Read that again. Greenwich’s special dispensation for the estate crowd is New Canaan’s entire proposed ordinance. Everybody else in denser Greenwich neighborhoods gets an extra month of quiet. So when the referendum crew tells you our largest properties can’t possibly manage what we’re asking, understand what we’re asking: the deal Greenwich hands its backcountry addresses as a favor.
Bedford, meanwhile, is a less-dense municipality with grander, horsier lots than we have and a leaf blower law far stricter than ours. They’ve figured it out, and I haven’t yet heard of a civil war breaking out there over enforcement. We can do this, guys. If I, a shoeless peasant in the 2-acre zone, can absorb whatever my Westport-based landscaper does to his rates (likely nothing, since he likely owns the electric equipment, and if he doesn’t, he can borrow mine), so can you.
Can We Wrap This Up So Everyone Can Vote?
The referendum crowd wants you to believe this vote is about freedom. And it is, just not solely theirs. It’s about your freedom to hear yourself think on a Tuesday in July. Your freedom to unmute yourself on a Zoom call when working from home. Your kid’s freedom to nap, your lungs’ freedom to do their one job, and the freedom of the guy wearing the engine to someday retire with his heart and his hearing intact. Against all that, the opposition offers: a landscaper’s overhead. I’ve weighed it. It took a second.
So please show up on Saturday, July 25th, and vote. Because the language of these things can be confusing, once more: it’s YES to uphold the ordinance, and NO if you want to keep hearing leaf blowers until your dying day. Can’t make it? Absentee ballots are available until July 24th at the Town Clerk’s office, 8 AM–3 PM Monday through Thursday, 8 AM–1:30 PM Friday. I’ve already voted absentee; it couldn’t have been simpler. And unlike the leaf blower next door, the Clerk’s office is quiet, pleasant, and finished with you fast. Democracy already happened once this year. Apparently, we’re doing it twice. Bring your ID and your sense of perspective, and let’s be done with this Temu solution to our Town & Country aspirations.
I love the version of the American Dream that I found in New Canaan.
But who can dream with all this racket?
Please let Penny Ault and all the other good dogs of New Canaan, enjoy their afternoons in peace.
I know I will sleep better tonight after your careful analysis and knowing your view point on this issue
Thanks Laura I hate to admit I haven’t been on top of it and didn’t even realize how short the ban was or that homeowners can use their own on patios or driveways if they must. The sound in the peace of summer is terrible and there aren’t leaves! Thanks for the clarification because I had thought it was something far more aggressive.
This op ed is nothing short of perfection. I laughed, I cried, I marveled at how expertly crafted this piece is. 10/10 no notes as the kids say. Thank you for putting into words how many of us feel. Here I was, feeling like I was screaming into the void/banging my head against a wall/insert any other idiom for stressed out and defeated. And then I come across this work of art!! What’s that I feel? Is it hope? Is it a glimmer of possibility? There are like-minded residents here who give a hoot?!
I will be voting YES on July 25th. This GLB ban is a tiny step in the right direction. It’s time for New Canaan to join the rest of CT in passing meaningful environmental legislation to protect our community.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to share this op Ed with everyone I know.
Brilliantly and compassionately written with science to corroborate every fact. Thank you so much.
Pretty much exactly what Britt said.
Thank you for clarifying some things that no local paper has been able to articulate. Next, I suggest you move onto peace in the Middle East.
yes! Pls solve middle east peace.
Thanks, Laura. (Mic drop.) how do you possibly debate this evidence-based article? Voting YES.
Brillant articulate accurate to the point. Thank you for taking time research to move us forward in right direction. Like my niece in Calabasas CA now let’s go beyond think outside the box for our health environment.
Laura, this is so well done and compelling. Thank you for sharing your personal analysis and conclusions. As always, folks should vote their conscience but you have done a great job of expressing the science and the other considerations. There are points pro and con of this ordinance, yet the YES far outweighs the NO in safeguarding health and sanity for our town. Who could possibly object to that?
Zero notes! Not one! Brilliant work, Laura!!
Thank you for your analysis, Laura. (and judging by his note above, for annoying Arnold Karp once again) You’ve convinced me. I would take it a step further if you really want reduced noise levels. Require landscaping companies that operate in New Canaan to annually provide a signed application with receipts showing their lawn mower mufflers have been replaced.
Bravo! Thank you Laura
I understand the concerns on the health side of this – no argument there. Although if we are truly concerned about the health aspects the question should be asked why the ban doesn’t include all 2-cycle engine tools like string trimmers/weed whackers, hedge trimmers, chain saws, etc.
But on the noise side of the issue, I think the solution to a noise problem should be based on noise levels measured in neighboring properties. Because there a lots of different noise sources – thundering or screaming motorcycles, music played loudly on outdoor speakers or bands playing outside at private parties, dogs barking during the wee hours of the night. Why are gas powered leaf blowers the only focus of the referendum? What New Canaan needs – perhaps in addition to a ban on 2-cycle engines – is a stronger noise ordinance.
Yes, yes, yes. Thank you Laura.
It has been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The leaf blower ordinance passed by the Town Council is a municipal camel, a law filled with contradictions and ultimately nothing more than a symbolic gesture. It claims to protect public health while exempting the very people who work for the Town. It claims to modernize landscaping practices while ignoring the technical and economic realities faced by the small businesses who maintain our properties.
If gas blowers are truly a health threat, why are municipal crews allowed to use them? A rule that applies only to private landscapers but not to the Town undermines its own stated purpose. It is inconsistent on its face.
The ordinance also assumes that electric equipment can seamlessly replace commercial gas blowers. It cannot. Even the highest end electric blowers lack the runtime, power, and durability required for full day work on New Canaan’s larger properties. Landscapers would need multiple battery sets per worker, thousands of dollars in new equipment, and even then the tools cannot perform at the level needed. Those costs will be passed directly to homeowners.
Worse, the Town provided virtually no transition period. Small landscaping businesses were given almost no time to retool their operations, purchase new equipment, or adjust pricing. For a community that prides itself on supporting local businesses, this ordinance imposes an unusually heavy and unrealistic burden.
Finally, residents deserve a direct say in a policy that affects their homes, their costs, and the people who maintain their properties. A referendum is not anti democratic. It is democracy, the mechanism citizens use when they believe a policy was rushed, incomplete, or out of step with real world conditions. If the ordinance truly reflects broad community support, there should be no objection to letting voters decide.
I am not against a leaf blower noise ordinance, but it is certainly not this one. As written, it is illogical and filled with contradictions. I urge the Town Council to consider a year round Sunday ban, a simple, coherent, noise based rule that actually aligns with the concerns the ordinance claims to address.
Gotta start somewhere. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good.
The argument that the ban should go further (i.e. include the town) is absurd since you clearly don’t want ANY ban. But I could see the benefit of expanding this ban after this goes into effect and has no detrimental impact on the town. Yes a few very large properties might pay more, but the more electric equipment we buy, the cheaper and better it will get. We’re already seeing a LOT more electric leaf blower options than were available before our neighboring towns passed a ban. And, I spoke to a one of the landscapers working on my yard last week about the electric equipment and he said he had it in his trailer and showed it to me. He said he has it because he works in other towns too and that it works just fine. not as powerful as the gas equipment, but good enough.
Stop the noise ?– stop cutting your lawns every week
and try every other week — save some $$$$ and less noise.
Important: Absentee ballots are available until July 24th at the Town Clerk’s office, 8 AM–3 PM Monday through Thursday, 8 AM–1:00 PM Friday.
Brava, Laura, come sempre!
I will be voting yes. I do have a metal roof and a very wooded lot with overhanging trees, so I will be blowing my roof during summer with my 18-year old gas blower.
For all who vote yes, there’s a lot more you can do. Mow your lawn less frequently instead of every week. If you have a very large lawn, let the distant portion run wild through the summer and cut it back in Sep. I see a lot of people with large acreage do that but more need to follow. I usually mow my lawn only once or twice during summer and every month during fall so that it’s easier to blow the leaves.
And I will consider an electric blower in a couple of years after my Stihl BR600 celebrates her 20th unless the cost of electric blowers comes down dramatically this Black Friday. The BRA600 is a whopping $1600 with batteries.
Brilliant piece!
I truly hope this op-ed gets the attention it deserves. Please everyone, ask your neighbors to read it, share it and vote Yes. Thank you Laura!
I voted!
With the hint of the moat early on in this piece, why do I get the sense that there’s way more where that came from?
A 2011 Edmunds study found that one consumer-grade leaf blower emitted 23 times the carbon monoxide and nearly 300 times the hydrocarbon emissions of a Ford F-150 Raptor pickup. To match a half-hour of leaf blowing in hydrocarbon output, you’d have to drive that truck nearly 4,000 miles.
You can’t believe everything you find on the internet. A Ford Raptor gets 14 mpg at city speeds. To drive 4000 miles it would consume 285 gallons of gas. A 2 stroke backpack leaf blower uses 0.5 gallons of gas in an hour.
How can the analysis be cited be true?
Well, I think you’re confusing a couple of things here. First, Edmunds isn’t some chatbot making up stuff to “believe on the internet.” It’s kind of the standard when measuring all-thing-automotive. And it published its research pretty extensively :
Secondly, it seems you’re confusing “fuel consumption” with “emissions.” Edmunds isn’t saying a leaf blower burns as much gas as a pickup. It’s saying it outputs wayyyy more non-methane hydrocarbon emissions per minute than a Raptor. About 300 times as much. This is because modern trucks have all sorts of fancy emissions controls while two-stroke engines don’t (i.e. outputting unburned gas would be a pretty big red flag for Ford if Raptors were doing that at all, much less 30%). Which is precisely the point. That’s why you’d have to drive to California and back half-way to get as much bad emissions as a gas-powered leaf blower does in half-an-hour.
To quote Edmunds, “So if you want to go green, ditch the yard equipment and blow leaves using a Raptor.”
As far as the db noise issue, if one can compare gas leaf blowers to a Madison Square Garden concert, surely that can’t be a good thing?
Sorry, here is Edmunds link (they have a few articles on this topic) : https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html
A commercial backpack gas backpack blower like a Stihl BR800 has a noise level of 80 dB at 50 ft and 75 dB at 100 ft. By comparison a concert at MSG has an average noise level of 95 – 100 dB at the lower levels and can reach in excess of 110 dB.
Laura this is a brilliant analysis of the issue. Nice job!
I love New Canaan, it really is the Next Station to Heaven; and evidence of that are the people who work hard to care for it: the brilliance of your Op Ed Laura, the hard work of the Environmental Commission over the last many years and the intelligence of the Town Council to get this done.
I reached out to the Town Council to let them know how wonderful the “Ban” worked. The week the Town Council’s regulation went into effect, the peace around my home/office was WONDERFUL. There was no pollution and I could keep my windows open! Imagine that! I enjoyed my property!
The previous pattern was a combined 8 hours of commercial leaf blowers going on multiple properties around me on both Thursdays and Fridays, about 4 hours a day the rest of the week. (We are in a Two Acre Zone)
Instead, my neighbor’s landscapers mowed and briefly used their very quiet electric leaf blowers in compliance with what they thought was an active ban. New Canaan was heavenly again! The lawns were just as beautiful.
My neighbor’s crews eventually discovered that there was going to be a referendum , so my bliss only lasted a week, but it was a wonderful sample of how great this regulation is – and it was GREAT!!! (I do thank them for complying, if only briefly.)
It needs to be put into effect – I am voting YES.
To the opposition, it’s simple. If you can keep the noise, toxins, dust and all pollutants on your property, then go crazy with it! Just don’t pollute me and my neighbors. And by the way, stop blowing it into the streets and on neighbor’s properties! I see that time and time again.
Anyone who cares about their neighbors and cares about New Canaan should also vote YES. It is a very good thing. And thank you again Laura Ault for showing that in such wonderful humor and complete thoroughness!
Anyone else smell smoke outside today? That’s the wildfires yet again from Canada. https://www.ctinsider.com/weather/article/connecticut-wildfire-smoke-air-quality-wednesday-22345983.php
Then you can do a little research on what has greatest impact on air quality in Fairfield County, where exactly within the county.
You find these are the main reasons:
1) Wildfires (like the ones causing our smoky smell today, coming from Canada)
2) High temps and low humidity (More hardscape concentrates heat)
3) Emissions from industrial facilities and transportation. (Inrix study has found that I-95 Greenwich to Fairfield is the most congested highway in the entire U.S. and the state supermajority has done little to address these serious infrastructure concerns while at the same time imposing new onerous higher density mandates through HB8002 for housing development.)
Check out the Air Quality map of lower Fairfield County here by looking up Stamford, CT which is also overall rated moderate, but for a few dense downtown areas around Rt.1: https://firststreet.org/city/stamford-ct/973000_fsid/air
The areas of greatest air quality issues are also the areas with highest density development, this is not shocking since the increased hardscape increases temperatures in those areas and there are less trees and greenery to offset the rising temps.
Electricity is needed to power the batteries for the electric leaf blowers. We have heard landscapers need to use 13 batteries a day when it comes to electric leaf blowers for commercial usage daily. Those are costly. The additional batteries can cost nearly as much as the equipment itself and they need to be replaced frequently when they lose their ability to recharge.
Where does that electricity come from? Mostly portable generators powered with gas or from electricity generation plants that again uses fossil fuels, which likely have the greatest impacts on the area’s air quality, rather than the one off leaf blowers, used for very short periods of time by landscapers, especially during the summer months. The Bridgeport electricity plant is the nearest larger energy generation plant.
From the above link, note that for New Canaan, which has 65-75% 2+acres zoning, the air quality impact is rated as “moderate” for coming decades, while the other towns/cities with bans are located along the RT1 and I95 corridor. The densest parts of Greenwich and Stamford are rated as “heavy” for air quality impact and the densest parts of Norwalk and Westport are rated as “severe” for air quality impact.
Seems education would be a much better direction for the town rather than forced mandates on all residents and residents calling the police on their neighbors to issue fines on them. And as stated before, noise cannot be addressed through the ordinance by solely targeting commercial leaf blowers, which operate on a very limited basis during the summer months anyway and don’t address the other equipment. We can do better, CAN THE BAN, VOTE NO!
Maria’s comment needs another misinformation alert.
1) Pollution from gas leaf blowers is off the scale compared to electric power generation. Bridgeport’s power stations run on natural gas with sophisticated pollution control equipment (see https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/bridgeport-harbor-station-5/?cf-view). In contrast, gas leaf blowers have no pollution controls and burn a mixture of gas and oil, 30% of which they spew out unburned next to your back yard. Trying to equate the two is deeply misleading.
2) Her claims about electric equipment are similarly untrue. A number of all-electric landscapers already do business in our area, charging normal market rates. They do not need gas generators. If you came by Quiet New Canaan’s table at the Sidewalk Sale, you saw the commercial electric backpack blower we had on display, which runs 4-5 hours on a charge and has the same power as gas. Its operating cost is far lower than gas, so it pays for itself in less than 2 seasons and creates thousands of dollars in additional profit after that. Batteries last for years and are recycled at the end of their life — just like the battery in your laptop or phone.
3) Anyone who lives in New Canaan, whether on a large or small property, knows that the noise from gas leaf blowers is not “for very short periods of time”. During the five Town Council hearings and year-long media discussion before the ordinance was passed, many town residents testified that ongoing gas blower noise makes it impossible for them to enjoy their own homes in peace and quiet, and many more emailed the Town Council to tell them this. Pretending otherwise is simply false and disrespects the real concerns of town residents.
4) The pious talk about doing better is not exactly credible coming from people who have fought nonstop against any effective regulation at all. If this ordinance is voted down, can you seriously believe that they would do anything to protect you? Let’s start with the ordinance we have, and then improve it over time if we need to.
New Canaan voters have a clear choice this week. We can choose the facts: gas leaf blowers harm our health and quality of life, and there is a practical, clean and economically sensible electric alternative. This is all backed by medical research, data and evidence. The opposition only offers you an everchanging, increasingly desperate mashup of misinformation, distortion and irrelevance. Please vote Yes, at the high school on July 25 or via absentee ballot at Town hall, to enact New Canaan’s summer-only restrictions on gas leaf blowers.
Many excellent points made in the article, but one thing is missing, the outsize contribution of these gas engines to the production of global warming gases. Gas-powered 2-stroke engines like these that have no pollution controls and give off enormous amounts of global warming gases like CO2 and NxO and CO. In Connecticut we burn some 40 million gallons of gas just for lawn-care. UN scientists say we must cut our carbon output nearly in half by 2030 or we go over climate tipping points Support this small step.
You need to catch up with the latest science on global warming. Even scientists and The NY Times are backing off on their dire predictions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/climate/emissions-worst-case-scenario-rcp.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Electric leaf blower batteries have vastly improved and good ones are widely available lasting 90 minutes of more. Pellenc has an electric leaf blower battery that lasts 4-6 hours according to their literature and to Stamford landscaper Nelson Munoz, owner of Cultural Lawns, who I highly recommend. It’s true that the upfront equipment costs are much higher for battery operated devices, but gas, oil and maintenance are far more expensive for gas devices. In fact, landscapers who use electric equipment commonly have a positive return on investment in well under two years (often at 13 months) because electricity is so much less expensive. For every $1 spent in fuel, powering with electricity is roughly 10-15 cents and any household outlet works to inexpensively charge a few batteries.
Hundreds of communities, many as leafy as New Canaan have full bans and workers are happy with the new equipment. They are better for their hearing, they don’t smell like gas, they are healthier and have fewer sick days. Electric equipment is more dependable and lasts longer according to the professionals. This is good for public health and for the business bottom line.
California banned the sale of all gas-powered lawncare equipment because the smog-forming air pollution was greater than pollution from cars, much like Fairfield County. Air and noise pollution not just a nuisance–they are very expensive public health costs that everyone is paying for. The few people fighting this are like the hard-core smokers that wanted to smoke wherever they wanted, your health be damned. We all have a right to breathe clean air! Please vote YES to uphold this ordinance.
Thank you for this excellent article!