City officials are recommending against any new regulations on gas-powered leaf blowers and other landscaping tools to the Boulder City Council. After several years of examining the environmental and noise pollution from these devices, they cited the high costs of electric alternatives, the limited availability of such equipment and equity concerns as reasons for not pursuing full electric equipment mandates right now.
“Staff remain concerned about adopting a regulatory strategy at this time,” a new city memo states.
According to the memo, if pressed by city council to regulate, city staff recommend a several-year rollout. This would give the city more time to educate landscaping companies and help them acquire electric equipment.
“A minimum two-year phase-in should be adopted, where year one would be focused solely on education and outreach and year two would be limited to warnings and further education,” according to the memo. It added that the enforcement timeline should be flexible to accommodate supply chain constraints.
City staff also suggested focusing any potential future regulations on homeowners who hire lawn services, rather than the companies themselves. So Boulder residents who hire companies using gas-powered equipment could potentially face fines, not the businesses they hired.
The city council will weigh these recommendations and decide the city’s direction at its May 15 meeting — a session requested by the previous council last year. At that time, the council asked city staff to consider regulation while continuing to educate lawn care professionals about electric equipment and the health impacts of their current tools.
Gas-powered landscaping equipment is harmful to the environment and to the health of nearby people and workers using it, emitting carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides that form smog and carcinogenic hydrocarbons, according to much research. An hour of leaf blowing emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car approximately 1,100 miles, the city has said. However, despite the pollution and numerous resident complaints about the noise from gas-powered lawn equipment, banning or restricting these tools raises issues of tradeoffs and equity.
Landscaping is one of the easiest industries to break into due to its low overhead costs. Regulations would primarily affect small Boulder County businesses — many of which are minority-owned and operate on slim margins. The city memo estimates that as many as 2,500 landscaping companies operate countywide.
Boulder recently launched a pilot program to help a few landscaping companies buy electric equipment, providing vouchers to cover 80% of the costs of electric landscaping tools. About $212,000 was allocated for the program last year and less this year. Despite this financial assistance, lengthy wait times for ordering electric equipment led some businesses to forgo their vouchers, according to the city.
If this initiative were expanded to support 100 companies in electrifying, city staff estimate it would require about $1.4 million in vouchers.
At the state level, Colorado air-quality regulators approved a new rule this year to limit the use of gas-powered lawn equipment starting in 2025. It bans state agencies from using gas-powered equipment with 25 horsepower or less during the summer ozone season from June 1 to Aug. 31. Local governments in a nine-county Front Range area (including Boulder) face a similar ban for equipment under 10 horsepower. The measure is viewed as a step towards a fuller ban.
“I think that’s a good, meaningful first step that we’ll probably learn from as well,” said Carolyn Elam, senior sustainability manager for the city and lead author of the memo.
Similar to the state’s partial ban, at the study session last year, councilmembers were supportive of phasing out gas-powered equipment over several years while restricting their use to a limited number of weeks in the spring and fall.
Local landscaping businesses have told city staff that using electric leaf blowers over gas would not only require more blowers with several battery changes, but also more time, cutting into their business. To cover costs of switching to electric and compensating for extra labor hours, lawn care companies might have to increase their rates in Boulder if a gas ban were implemented, or they might choose not to operate in Boulder at all, they said.
One business told the city that it started as an all-electric lawn care company but switched to gas when it found that Boulder residents were unwilling to pay the premium for electric services.
However, for individual homeowners, the transition to electric equipment is already happening, as noted in the memo, because for home projects, electric tools are more accessible and often superior to gas counterparts.
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