WALNUT CREEK — Many leaves on the 1,200 trees near Jeanette Asselin’s Countrywood home still haven’t dropped, but she’s already worried about how to pick them all up.
The 72-year-old Asselin, who has served for 20 years on her neighborhood’s self-managed homeowner’s association, said a small, in-house crew maintains the walking paths and picnic areas that line the nearly 300 homes built on the corner of Treat Boulevard and Bancroft Road. When inundated with foliage, the area can quickly become slippery, and Asselin said clearing the paths is the cheapest way to prevent falls or other complaints about the 42-acre property’s landscaping.
She’s worried that might change after the weather dries out in the spring, when Walnut Creek will start enforcing a ban on the gas-powered blowers that keep Countrywood leaf-free.
“I think we all agree that we need to go electric,” Asselin said. “But when all the leaves fall – and so often they’re wet – they need higher-powered machines. Currently, those are gas, until the technology can catch up.”
In April, Walnut Creek will join a long list of cities across the Bay Area that have banned the small gas engines that power many leaf blowers. Los Altos became the first to oust the noisy power tools in 1991 – a policy sparked by noise complaints that was quickly duplicated in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, as well. Since then, Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael and Santa Cruz have followed suit.
Kevin Wilk, Walnut Creek’s Mayor Pro Tem, said he supports the ban because it reduces pollution, emissions and noise, making good on commitments laid out in the city’s July 2023 Sustainability Action Plan. He remains cautious, however, about potential unintended consequences of the new policy — particularly the idea that Walnut Creek’s phone lines, email inboxes and staff time could be inundated with leaf blower whistleblowers.
Complaints will be directed to owners of the property where the banned use is reported, city officials clarified, rather than targeting individual landscapers.
“But my concern is that a lot of the enforcement is challenging – pitting neighbor versus neighbor,” Wilk said over the phone this week, explaining how an elected official from Santa Barbara, where a ban was enacted in the late 1990s, gave him a warning. “If you think NextDoor is bad now, wait until you pass this ban,’ and I took that to heart.
“My fear is they’re going to overload 911,” Wilk added, acknowledging the added scrutiny to landscapers at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have intensified crackdown efforts in recent months. More than 60% of the workforce running leaf blowers is of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish (HLS) origin, according to the National Association of Landscape Professionals.
Regulating this controversial lawn equipment would have been a lot more difficult, Wilk said, before October 2021. That’s when California began phasing out the machines statewide after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1346, which required all small, off-road engines sold in the state to be zero-emission – standards set too high for more than 15 million edgers, hedge trimmers, lawn mowers and other power tools used daily in California.
That ban on the sale of spark-ignition, gas-powered ones didn’t take effect until the January 1, 2024, deadline set by regulators with the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
“If the state were to ban gas-powered blowers outright, then we’d all have to follow the law, but that’s not the case,” he said. Now, nearly two years after electric became the only new option available from California retailers, Wilk said he’ll push for a clear plan for education and enforcement of the new leaf blower ordinance – whether through a dedicated phone inside city hall or the police non-emergency lines – because he questioned whether residents will “just call the only number they know by heart.”
Hundreds of leaf blower complaints regularly stack up along the peninsula.
The Los Altos Town Crier reported in May that a renewed crackdown of code enforcement between 2023 and 2024 led to hundreds of new cases — a trend that was replicated in Palo Alto next door, where 1,427 cases were opened for leaf blower complaints in 2024 alone.
While many of the early policy changes were largely by noise complaints, the recent push to phase out these engines focuses on its toll on the local environment and the human body. The California Air Resources Board has reported that operating a commercial gas-powered leaf blower for one hour emits the same amount of smog-forming pollution as a light-duty passenger car making the 1,100-mile, 15-hour drive from Los Angeles to Denver.
The Countrywood crew is leaf blowing up to six hours a day during peak leaf season, according to a manager of the property, who asked not to be identified because she has received threats over the polarizing issue.
Walnut Creek officials rejected adding a sort of exemption that would allow large commercial operations more flexibility during the transition away from gas-powered blowers. However, the council agreed to delay implementation until April – avoiding the wettest winter months when soggy leaves make landscapers’ jobs more difficult.
While the manager of the HOA property is ready to embrace a cleaner alternative to gas-powered engines, she said the switch will dramatically throttle the machines’ power and longevity – making work untenable for landscapers that need to cover a lot of land.
“If we had to rake or use electric blowers – with batteries that can run out in 30 minutes – the property would take a whole year to clear out, let alone when it’s like this,” she said, referring to the atmospheric river that drenched the Bay Area this week.
While electric blowers aren’t noiseless, the manager said there’s some relief in knowing that their sound is less grating than those that run on gas.
“Then the other two-thirds then become our problem – we’re going to be able to do less, but it will cost more,” she said. On top of additional labor and equipment costs, she estimated that she’ll need to pay upwards of $10,000 to buy new electric blowers before the new law takes effect.
“We’re not trying to resist progress or conversion,” the manager said, “but you have to be sustainable about being sustainable.”