The task force charged with making sure Evanston can reach its climate goals sounded off Wednesday on the issue that has been roiling the city for the past month – gas-powered leaf blowers.
During its March meeting held at the Morton Civic Center Wednesday, the CARP Implementation Task Force – the Environment Board body charged with making sure the city’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan is carried out – generally agreed to support the ban now in place. The task force did broadly agree that Spanish-language outreach on the ban could’ve been better, however.
The City Council is considering temporarily lifting the ban from March 18 to April 8. This came after a predominantly Hispanic group of landscapers showed up at the Human Services Committee’s February meeting. The group complained that they haven’t been able to transition to more expensive electric leaf blowers and urged the council to lift the ban for three weeks as lawn maintenance gets underway. During its March meeting, the committee backed the suspension.
The full council is expected to cast the final vote on Monday.
The vote would happen before the Environment Board’s regularly scheduled March 14 meeting, so it won’t have a chance to weigh in. But CARP task force members generally agreed that they supported keeping the ban in place, and they decided to weigh in on their own, with Environment Board co-chair Matt Cotter agreeing to share their views with the council.
Task force members: Rakes are available
Task force member Jerri Garl argued that gas-powered leaf blowers versus electric-powered ones was a “false choice,” given that rakes are available.
“I know for a fact that there are skilled raking techniques that can be used that are very efficient and pretty rapid,” she said. “[Raking leaves] doesn’t stir up all the dust and all the particles that are damaging to health.”
Task force member Hal Sprague agreed.
“If they can carry around [a] 30-pound thing on their back, they can carry a rake,” he said. “It’s not like they’re weak and they need something nice and easy.”
While he said that gas-powered leaf blowers might be better suited for large jobs – for example, drying an athletic turf field – he argued that the only downside of using rakes is that they take longer, which he didn’t see as good enough reason to use the gas blowers.
“That’s all that it’s about – speed,” Sprague said. “They’re not concerned about people’s health; they’re not concerned about anybody’s noise problem. And, I’m sorry, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.”
Task force chair Katarina Topalov, who also sits on the Environment Board, also spoke in support of the ban.
“Leaf blowers not being powerful enough is just an issue of adjusting until we have more powerful [electrically powered] models,” she said. “It isn’t something that should stop a leafblower ban until technology catches up.”
‘Nothing in Spanish’
Task force member Wendy Pollock, who serves as the RoundTable’s environment editor, argued that the way Evanston shares information may have muddled the waters. When she tried to look up the ban on the city website, she said, the results were “old information, not the current information, and nothing in Spanish.”
Cara Pratt, the city sustainability specialist, said that she had put together a more up-to-date page. Pollock said that the fact that it didn’t come up at the top of the search results is a symptom of a larger problem. “One of the issues I encountered with the city website, because it’s not well-updated as a whole, I used to search a lot, and I end up with a lot of old, outdated things,” she said.
Pratt speaks Spanish, which came in handy when she fielded calls from landscapers. But the task force agreed that this shouldn’t fall on her, and Pratt said that any outreach is hampered by inadequate staffing.
“We have two people in our communications division, and we don’t have anyone explicitly dedicated to community engagement, we don’t have an equity manager,” she said.
Climate task force supports keeping gas-powered leaf blower ban in place is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.