Please leave well enough alone

Recently, we read news about someone asking our North Cowichan Town Council to consider banning “gas-powered” garden tools. I found this curious as there are very few gas powered garden tools.

There are many non-motorized, short-handled and long-handled garden equipment, such as rakes, shovels, cultivators of all sizes, manual pruners, manual branch pruners; you get the picture.

On the other hand, however, there are many gas and gas-mixed landscaping tools such as power saws, hedge trimmers, brush cutters, pole saws, lawn mowers, tractors lawn mowers, pressure washers, leaf blowers and lawn aerators. There are therefore two types of “tools” to consider; the reference to gardening tools is broader when talking about “landscape design”.

Without going into great detail, there are many reasons why such a restriction on North Cowichan residents makes absolutely no sense, would increase household costs, and impose higher costs on the people who manage the landscape to make a living. . The idea does not apply here and should be dropped altogether without further waste of North Cowichan staff time and other council business.

The letter writer described a recent action by the city of Oak Bay as a comparative one. We are not in Oak Bay. North Cowichan has nothing to do with the urban center of Oak Bay. We are rural in nature; we have significant landscape management challenges at many of our properties. In my case, with over half an acre, I have tall hedges and my own little forest of trees which needs attention as well as a large lawn, fruit trees, many large shrubs and bushes to maintain. There is absolutely nothing in North Cowichan quite like Oak Bay; One size does not fit all. In my case, like my neighbors, I have a suite of tools needed for each specific task. I maintain, in some cases, two similar action tools; one gas powered and one electric or lithium-ion battery powered. People need the flexibility to make their own choices based on their particular needs and management requirements. We don’t need our municipality to invoke “bans” or even phased “bans”. In some cases, the power of gas or gas-mixed equipment is needed to do the job at hand and electric and battery-powered equipment is simply not up to the job. And why go to the cost of unnecessarily replacing gas-powered equipment in good working order. And please don’t even think about more subsidies that only cost taxpayers more because of their overly burdensome property taxes.

The author of the letter that presented this proposal burns firewood for heating, among other things. According to my last check, firewood comes from trees; the trees are felled, split and delivered by trucks or another gasoline-powered machine. Heck, there may even have been a diesel-powered logging truck involved. This same firewood is therefore generated with noisy and carbon-polluting equipment, two of the objections made by the writers of the letter. Moreover, if these people burn wood during the fall, winter and spring to create atmosphere and warmth in their house, it makes them consummate hypocrites, because burning firewood generates a lot of pollution. atmosphere and carbon emissions. Perhaps their neighbors, who might annoy them with gas-powered equipment, might be annoyed by their columns of wood smoke billowing around their neighbors’ house. To be clear, I love wood fireplaces and I love the smell of firewood and the ambiance of a good wood fire and I support wood fireplaces. This particular reference describes how people might come up with something while acting hypocritically; do as I say, not as I do.

As for the noise, allow me to offer this point of view. Anyone moving into and living in a development knows full well that there is a normal and acceptable level of noise generated during the day by people enjoying their properties and maintaining their properties. This noise, whether from power washing, lawn mowing, or tree removal, is fleeting, often seasonal, and depends on the subdivision where people live. Obviously in my neighborhood, which all have lots of half an acre or more, there is a lot of “biomass” management required at specific times of the year. However, places like the new Kingsview subdivision, with small, mostly stone lots, require very little maintenance. Each landowner can acquire the tool necessary for his particular situation, whether battery-powered, electric or oil-powered. It is not up to our municipality to impose unreasonable restrictions on owners of single-family homes.

Finally, our municipality already has a variety of regulations in place regarding noise and time of day constraints. Please leave well enough alone.

Bryan Wallis

maple berry

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