Reacting to the blitz of arrests and activity by federal immigration agents in the area, the village of Oak Park has decided to tweak how it enforces its ban on gas powered leaf blowers. Tickets for using a gas powered leaf blower will, for the time being, only be issued to property owners and not to contractors. And the village will stop taking photos of those using gas powered leaf blowers.
The change came last week after village trustee Cory Wesley had proposed suspending the enforcement of the ban of gas powered leaf blowers, which went into effect on June 1. He said enforcement would cause fear and anxiety among landscape workers.
“The folks who are impacted most disproportionately by our leaf blower ordinance are predominantly Latino,” Wesley said Oct. 14. “Those also happen to be the people who are targeted by ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). I’d rather not send village people to also target them with citations, because the ICE situation is not just the actions of picking people up but also the fear that it induces by being profiled, by being racially profiled by how you look or the language that you speak.”
Wesley, who is Black, said that he has been, and continues to be, racially profiled.
“Putting folks in a situation where they already have anxiety and giving them more, when we can control not to, seems like a prudent course of action in our current times,” he said.
Wesley who withdrew his motion to suspend enforcement of the ordinance after a compromise was agreed upon following 30 minutes of discussion.
Environmental activists who had pushed to ban gas powered leaf blowers in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions did not want to suspend enforcement of the ban.
“This is one of those difficult places of conflicting priorities,” said village trustee Brian Straw.
The compromise was worked out in which, for the time being, only property owners, not contractors, would be issued tickets. The ordinance previously allowed either homeowners or contractors to be ticketed. Violating the ordinance is a civil violation akin to a traffic ticket and fines can range from as low as $20 to as high as $750 and are typically less than $50 according to Oak Park spokesman Dan Yopchick.
Jonathan Burch, the village’s assistant manager and neighborhood services director, told the village board that in June, July and August the village received 86 complaints and 52 tickets were issued for violating the leaf blower ordinance. Of those, 27 were issued to property owners and 25 to landscapers. Only four additional citations have been issued since Sept. 1, Yopchick said.
Wesley said that taking photographs of landscapers would increase anxiety and fear among landscapers, although Straw downplayed that concern.
“It’s really about the atmosphere of fear that’s been created by this sinister organization that I don’t want us to play into,” Wesley said.
Typically a photo of someone using a gas powered leaf blower is introduced at hearings when the ticket is adjudicated, but some wondered if just an affidavit from the civil enforcement officer would suffice. The Village Board decided to try that and see how it works.
“If we find we’re getting a bunch of cases tossed out we can come back,” Trustee Derek Eder said.
Many Village Board members have expressed outrage at the actions of federal agents.
“Terrible things are happening outside,” Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson said at the end of the meeting. “At any time of night and day poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes, families are torn apart, men, women and children are separated, children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”
Bob Skolnik is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
