Perhaps no law in Santa Barbara has been more openly and universally ignored as the gas-powered leaf blower ban embraced by a vote of the city residents in November 1997. This week, the Santa Barbara Grand Jury revealed that the ban has been even more widely disregarded than previously supposed.
In fact, the City of Santa Barbara’s own street sweeping crews — an arm of the Public Works Department — reportedly uses the very machines outlawed by City Hall. Not only that, the machines are widely and openly used by private contractors hired by City Hall.
For those seeking to complain to City Hall about the things — the infernal noise, the noxious fumes, their being against the law — the Grand Jury discovered theirs was a road to nowhere. Enforcement of the ban rests with the city police department, but the transgression ranks so low that by the time any officer gets around to responding, the violators will have moved on.
“Lack of meaningful enforcement,” the report concluded, “has nullified the will of the voters.”
The ban was enacted in 1997 by a popular vote in a campaign spearheaded by outspoken epigrammatist Ashleigh Brilliant, who saw in the machines everything wrong with Western industrial civilization. In just one hour, a gas-powered blower, the jury found, generates enough airborne pollution to rival one car driving 1,000 miles. Brilliant, a thin, soft-spoken man who died in October 2025, would be charged with assault for attacking a gardener — trying to yank his gas-powered backpack off his back — after repeatedly asking him to turn his leaf blower off. He would be criminally prosecuted.
The grand jury concluded that “a targeted enforcement effort would create immediate accountability and demonstrate that continued violations of the gas blower ban within the community will not go unaddressed.” More specifically, the Grand Jury suggested City Hall create “a short-term patrol-based enforcement task force.”
Even at the time of its adoption, there were political concerns about the optics: environmentally minded people picking on gardeners and landscapers. Still, it passed.
In the current climate — both politically and tight budgetary constraints — it’s hard to see City Hall acquiescing. Sources at City Hall told the Grand Jury they were contemplating a transition to electric-powered leaf blowers. But, the grand jury observed, they’ve been saying that for a long time.
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