Providence City Council Meeting | Febuary 5th, 2025 | Committee on Enviorment and Resiliency
Call to Order and Introductory Remarks
Chair Sue Anderboe called the Special Committee on Environment and Resiliency public hearing to order and recognized attending council members. She introduced the proposed ordinance regulating gas-powered lawn equipment and outlined the format for public testimony.
Public Hearing on Gas-Powered Lawn Equipment Ordinance
City officials, landscaping business owners, industry representatives, and residents testified on the proposed phaseout and transition to electric lawn equipment. Speakers debated public health, environmental emissions, and noise pollution against business operational costs, battery performance limitations, and timeline feasibility.
Adjournment
Chair Anderboe thanked the attendees and participating speakers for sharing their perspectives. Having heard all registered public testimony, she officially concluded the hearing and adjourned the meeting.
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Hello everybody. My name is Sue Anderboe. I'm the chair of the special committee on the environment resiliency. We're gonna call today's public hearing to order. I'm gonna acknowledge Councilwoman Anthony as a member of the committee here as well, and also Councilman Gonsalves is here.
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Thank you so much. And I think those are the only council people, but thank you. Oh, and Councilman Vargas, sorry Councilman Vargas is also here today. Councilwoman Peterson has joined us as well. Great.
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I'm just gonna say a few things before we kick off. We're here today to talk about the ordinance related to amend the gas powered lawn equipment ordinance. This is going to be a public hearing. There'll be no votes taken. We're here to listen to you and hear all of your feedback.
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We've also received a lot of written comment which will be entered into the record and has already been shared with all committee members and all council members. We have all of the written feedback we've received as well. Thank you so much. I also just wanted to share a few quick notes about this ordinance and show that this is a very frequent concern that's been shared with me by my constituents, particularly as more people work from home and both see and hear leaf blowers in our communities regularly. As I've already addressed the first time we discussed this in committee, my concern really is the carbon emissions and the pollution that come from the leaf blowers.
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And I also wanna emphasize that this is not intended to harm workers or small businesses. And I had a really great conversation with the folks from RINLO last night. I know many of you are here in the room, and I've committed to chatting with you guys afterward as well. Not tonight necessarily, but in the future having a conversation. I chatted with your new executive director last night.
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I also want to address, and I'm glad that Councilwoman Peterson is here. I know that there have been there's been some confusion about the mention of Latino workers. The intention mentioning that was that there are we have seen that the demographics of this of this business, there are a lot of workers of many different racial and ethnicity backgrounds, and the intent is not to target any of those folks and intentionally to be supportive of people of all backgrounds, and I believe some people read it the opposite way. And I just wanted to clarify that and thank councilwoman Peterson for bringing up that that was a point of confusion for folks, and we will amend that. So thank you councilwoman.
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And no further comment for me because this is really to hear from you, and so I'd love if the city sergeant if you could please bring up the sign in sheets to the clerks. And as he does that I'll remind folks when you come up please state your name clearly for the record and then you'll have about three minutes to speak because there are so many of us here today. I'll try and gently remind you around the like two forty five mark if you're still going. But we just wanna be respectful of everyone here. And that goes for you as well Councilman Vargas.
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I'm just teasing. Awesome. If we could start with Priscilla De La Cruz.
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Mic is on. Thank you, chairwoman and the raw and members of the council for this opportunity today. I am Priscilla De La Cruz. I am the director of sustainability for the city of Providence. I'm here today to offer some brief comments on behalf of the administration, supportive comments.
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So I have already provided you with some testimony, so I'll be brief in these remarks. So first to say thank you very much for the leadership in introducing this important ordinance to address the health and environmental impacts of using gas powered leaf floors. So we truly appreciate also the dialogue as well. Nothing here is of surprise. We've had a conversation with councilwoman Anderbois and also have been before the committee to discuss our learnings of the pilots that we've had with electric lawn care equipment, in particular between the departments of sustainability and the parks department.
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So first off to say that the mayor absolutely supports the intent of the ordinance. His only request is that we do adjust the years and that we offer some uniformity in terms of, when we'll be facing out to when we'll be prohibiting the use. And for us, a stream a streamlined approach of just focusing on 01/01/2031 makes the most sense, and and we've provided that feedback to councilwoman Anderbois. And that would allow us to be able to execute internally and externally and plan for both the internal and the external. Mostly for the internal operations, we've been learning a lot, so I provided that information in your packets.
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You have a copy of a memo that you've already seen from the parks superintendent, Wendy Nelson, and also Kevin Proff and my team, our deputy director, has been leading the pilot. And we have some insight for for you for what we've learned going back to f y twenty two. So really since 2021, 2022, we've been deploying electric lawn care equipment, and we've learned some things. So for us, changing the year to 2031 will really provide the city departments and city contractors, small businesses, and residents from our point of view to have clearer messages and streamline the streamline the communication and minimize confusion. Also, terms of city departments, based on our experience, there are some current limitations with the industry and the commercial needs.
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So really going back to the technology and what we need. We've also been testing a variety of equipment to really learn how to adapt that into our operations. So we wanna continue doing that. We've been allocating funding in the budget to to do that work in partnership with parks, and we plan on looking at other departments like public property. So we really wanna have the time to get that right and also address some of the funding constraints that that we all know we we face to be able to plan for that.
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So with that said, in your package, I won't go and read that word for word. You've seen some of these findings already, but we provided that for your reference. Happy to answer any questions, but like I said, we're here to work with you and we hope we can amend that year and then hope and help you get this through passage.
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Awesome. Thank you so much, director. And for anyone who is interested in the information that the sustainability department has, They did present to this committee in December, and that recording and this memo are available on the city's open meetings portal. If anyone has trouble locating it, please feel free to shoot me an email, and I'm happy to make sure you can see that presentation. Thank you, director.
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Awesome, thank you. Awesome, I'm gonna switch between support and oppose. Next I'll go to Councilman Vargas. You wanna wait? Okay.
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Then I'll go to Mark Pare. You have to press the button till the red light comes on. Unfortunately, you have to talk kind of uncomfortably close to the microphone. So I apologize. But
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yeah. Actually, I have, like, so much material to go over. I'm not gonna be able to cover it all in three minutes. And a lot of it was because
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And you're also welcome to send written comments.
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Great. A lot of it was to because I listened to the audio video from the December meeting, and there's so many false things in there. I just wanted to help you guys understand. So I guess I'll just get as far as I can until you x me off. Anyways, I'm Mark Perry from Kent County Lawnmower.
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I own a lawnmower shop in West Warwick. We have five employees, and, I wanted to talk to you about switching over to battery. So I was gonna go over all the specs that I did on my own testing with battery powered equipment. There are 100 decibels. I know that's a concern for everybody is noise.
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Just so you're aware that the battery powered stuff, commercial battery powered stuff, I know at your meeting in December that was discussed, 100 decibels, 94 decibels. They have a a higher pitch battery powered stuff, which is more dangerous for the user. That lower pitch they were talking about that goes through walls that people complain about, that's so the user, it ain't as loud. A lower pitch doesn't bother your eardrums as bad as a higher pitch does. So I'm gonna skip and miss you're gonna miss a lot of good information here.
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But
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And, please, I do really encourage you. You can even just hand me that piece of paper you're reading, and I would go
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to the top of Yeah. Charging. You gotta remember that these batteries cannot get wet. So majority of the landscapers have open trailers. They would need 200 batteries to get through the day per, no.
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If that was a three man crew, it would be 200 batteries. If you can picture a a backpack blower, it holds three batteries. The batteries are they're heavy. An electric battery powered blower is nine pounds heavier than comparable blower than gas powered. To you really need climate control to charge these batteries.
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If it's below 41 degrees and you put the battery on the charger, it'll just flash. It won't charge. It'll say, you know, it's it's the temperature's too cold. It it's a hazard. The battery would catch on fire.
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So with that, knowing that, landscapers would have to have enough batteries to get through a whole day because plugging into a homeowner's house is a liability. Because of the Rhode Island law, the no idle law, you can't leave your truck running to charge batteries, and I don't think you want a generator charging batteries. So on a backpack blower, it holds three batteries. You get about a twenty five minute run time. You can't go by the up to up to, it'll say, three hours thirty minutes.
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That's if you're running it on low. It's not realistic. So really encourage you to get a a commercial blower and use it like they would in the thick of it when the leaves are down and they're wet.
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And
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so not every landscaper out there has an enclosed trailer. They got open trailers. They live in apartments. When they come home at night, how do they charge 200 plus batteries? It's just it's gonna be impossible.
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It's gonna be a business killer for landscapers and lawn mower shops like myself because they're all disposable. We don't repair batteries. You throw them out. Run times I talked about. I'm just gonna give you a quick comparison.
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If a landscaper had to buy a battery powered blower, that's 36 newtons. Newtons is a measurement of wind force. The biggest gas powered blower that we sell our most popular is 48 newtons. So this biggest battery one that I can sell is 36 newtons. It's still a good sized blower.
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It would be, this doesn't sound believable, but it would be $27,000 in batteries they'd have to have per employee to get through the day. The charge time is an hour and a half. The run time is twenty five minutes. You can only charge two batteries on one charger. You can't charge them during the day.
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It's, I know you guys are rumbling
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about We're gonna have to we just hit the four minute. There's so many folks. But if you could hand that to the clerks, I will read everything you provide.
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Alright.
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Thank you so much, Mark. I'm gonna call Paul Badger for Morris Ave. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Paul.
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Yes. Just to refute the previous testimony in in the packet, there's a very nice testimony from a a landscaper who did the conversion and is not looking back. He thinks it's fine that they have the power. They have the batteries, it's all affordable. They end up spending less in terms of the conversion.
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So this problem is a classic problem in economics of the problem of pollution.
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Mhmm.
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And the way this this model works is that with pollution, a few people benefit greatly, and this is often fine it's always financial. Somebody makes money, sometimes a lot of money, and this pays for lobbyists. Everyone else is suffers a little bit, but lots of times the suffering is health or quality of life suffering and it's often not enough to generate a lobby. In this case, people hate these things so much that this packet is full of testimony, you know, against these things. There's a solution.
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So back to the in the problem of pollution, there's no free market solution. The economists have scratched their head, and they don't they don't have any kind of good solution to this from a free market standpoint. So it's up to government. So we're in the right place and the government needs to do the right thing. All I can say is the fines should be enough to be effective you know, with a sliding scale.
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And I also think that there should be some mechanism so people could send in their videos, photograph the trucks, photograph the license plates, and that would be enough to generate a fine to provide a video. Maybe a website could be provided for this so, we can get this problem done with. Thank you.
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Thank you, Paul. I'm gonna go to Ethan. I can't read your last name. It says Black Rock Road. Awesome.
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Hi. Please state your full name. Just yeah. For the record.
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Ethan Hatsway. Thank you, Chair Sue for letting me speak today. My name is Ethan Hattori. I work at my family's business, Hattori's Landscaping. I'm the past president of Renla and current board member.
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I'm here to oppose the amendment to this noise ordinance. I know Mark Perry just talked about section A on electric blowers being just as loud or if not louder than gas powered blowers. I know that was mentioned in the December 11 meeting by the park superintendent as well. So, I just want that to be known for the record. I think that section should be eliminated.
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I just think it's irrelevant and kind of misleading because they're they're both allowed. The weight of the battery is concerning to me. There is much more worker fatigue with a battery powered blower as opposed to a gas powered blower. So, that's not helpful to the worker either. It's just a given that back injuries will go up, more workman's comp claims, more workers complaining about heavier equipment rightfully so.
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Landscaping