Editor’s note: San Antonio read the following statement at the Leaf Blower Study Committee25 public forum on February 25. Click here to see links to previous coverage of this issue in the Lincoln Squirrel.
To the editor:
When I moved to Lincoln in 1991, I was positively elated to find such a special place. I grew up in Lawrence, Mass., and had lived in Boston, New York and then Los Angeles before returning to the East Coast. Feeling at that point quite starved for clean, safe space away from the pace of modern city life, my hope—no, my mission—was to find a place as uniquely beautiful as Lincoln with its inviting open fields, its intricate network of trails through the woods, and what in the beginning was relative peace and quiet.
I do not own property here, but I have rented since I arrived. I built a small massage, healing and yoga practice here, have taught a weekly class here for almost ten years and currently teach a gentle yoga for seniors at Bemis Hall. For the most part, I am thrilled to call Lincoln my home and happy to be part of this community.
I lived in South Lincoln center for the first five years from 1991-96 and witnessed the steady disintegration of that relative quiet, and peace in South Lincoln center. The regular daily sounds of the commuter rail, the commuter vehicle traffic, the heavy equipment company behind where I lived, the church bells outside my kitchen window, the construction of the Ryan Estate and so on and so forth were tolerable because they were somewhat transient and subsided on the weekends. But during this time, leaf blowers were coming into popular use and the incessant noise levels they introduced became unbearably worse to an obnoxious degree, and that became a primary reason for why I was eventually motivated to leave that particular area of town.
To those property and business owners here in town who believe that simply because you own property or run a business that should allow you to do whatever you want, I have an analogy for you to consider. That attitude is akin to sitting in a public place and smoking a cigarette based on the idea that it’s your lips, your fingers, handling the cigarette and that you’re the one breathing in the smoke and that you can do whatever you please with your fingers and your lips. However, it’s widely recognized and has become scientifically and legally determined that second-hand smoke is offensive to those who are not touching your cigarette with their fingers nor dragging on your cigarette with their lips but nevertheless inhaling the foul smoke that is emitted from your decision to smoke that cigarette.
Of course, one of our senses is the sense of smell and another is the sense of hearing. The sound that emanates from leaf blowers is equally offensive to the ears as smoke is to the nose. Not to mention that the airborne pollutants and dust that they produce has shown to be almost as deleterious to the lungs and nose as smoking. Moreover, the displacement of leaves from one spot to another sometimes imposes upon other properties which may not want those leaves that mother nature didn’t place there. So you are being offensive and intrusive by the indiscriminate, excessive use of a leaf blower.
I’d like to see this community restored to the condition it was in when I first fell in love with Lincoln. Yet I know that we cannot go backwards, so I’d like to see leaf-blowing regulated in this town so that more peace and quiet is preserved—it’s a precious resource. As a compromise, I propose that the use of leaf blowers regulated to certain hours—for example, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.—throughout town, and that they be disallowed entirely on Sundays.
Sincerely,
Annamaria San Antonio
71 Sandy Pond Rd.
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