As a prep I thought I would share some thoughts via email. Our discussions were lively and useful but I found I had left out some important points in the ebb and flow.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is from time to time a problem which involves noise. And no doubt that some folks in town have suffered from it and that perhaps it would be useful to have better tools to resolve it. That said, here are some comments, perhaps not in a coherent order.
Listening to Steve’s story, and to the description of the noisy motorcycle riders on bald hill, the ‘bird cannon’ story, I’m struck that the issue is really only peripherally about noise. At it’s heart, it’s about anti social behavior. Sure the neighbor might have been disappointed in Steve’s not being enthusiastic about running a power line across the property but he could have set up the generator on the far side of his house away from Steve, put some sound deadening around it and got on with life. Instead he chose to lay out a 500′ cord and place the generator where it would be most annoying, and raise it up to keep it that way when Steve put up the hay bales. That’s not a noise problem. That’s a ‘worms in the head’ problem. Noise is just the proximate effect.
Same thing with the bird cannon. Same thing with noisy bikers. They are using noise as a way of being anti social and ‘getting’ at someone they have a beef with. Creating a noise law as a handy dandy tool for ‘solving’ these issues isn’t really addressing the issue, nor do I feel it will have the desired effect. Kind of like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor. The underlying issue is still there.
H.L. Mencken once said “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” Yet we are all tempted to reach for the simple solution, the one that will give us a handle on a problem so we can make it go away. I think that’s where the drive naturally comes to create a noise law. But my fear, and the fear expressed to me by well over 100 people, is that the law will create more problems than it solves, and it won’t really solve problems.
Consider Steve’s situation, or the bird cannon issue. Both of those were personal conflicts, noise was just the tool. Do we think that swatting the person with a fine or multiple fines would have made the problem go away? Or would it have made them madder and perhaps caused them to be creative in other fashions to act out? Having gone to the trouble and energy of creating a disruptive noise source, do we think that energy would dissipate after ‘losing’ a noise law confrontation? My guess would be not, and while the noise might go away at least temporarily, I doubt the confrontation would and the temperature of the conflict would likely rise, not cool.
The flip side of the law is that depending on how it’s crafted, it can cause new conflicts to arise. Suppose I have a neighbor who doesn’t like me much, or doesn’t like some of the country things I do. Mostly they just grumble and make snarky comments, but the level of conflict is low. But along comes a shiny new noise law and voila, now they can allege that something I’m doing, perhaps the ‘clank’ of throwing horse shoes, is harshing their mellow and disrupting their peaceful enjoyment and now they can use the power of the town to enjoin me from doing the things I like to do and possibly even hit me with fines. How is that a good outcome? Do you think the temperature of neighborly relations will improve after such an action? I know one would say that the probability of this is very low, have you met Rhoda? Have you taken a stroll through youtube videos of crazy people telling others what to do at the top of their lungs? Unless the law is very narrowly crafted, with an eye towards making that difficult to impossible to do, many, many of us fear that the cure is worse than the disease.
Why not just have an anti social behavior law? (and in fact we do have some. Drunk and disorderly, etc) Just as subjective. Just as far reaching. Just as prone to abuse. Why stop at sound?
Some more thoughts on the temperature of the disagreements. Katherine expressed concerns about my language at the last meeting. I spoke of people potentially ‘weaponizing’ a new law, as illustrated above, against their neighbors. She didn’t like that term. In a language sense, I can agree – ‘Verbing weirds language’ as Calvin would say. But the sentiment is no less valid. But then moments later she expressed that some folks fear that going to talk to their neighbors lest they come to the door with a gun. Really? I mean, maybe at midnight if you start pounding on the door and yelling. But she pulled up that imagery as a way of dismissing the need for a low level neighbor to neighbor contact to try to resolve things. Plus there’s these things called phones…
But she brought up the specter of someone in the conversation showing up with a gun and making things much more fraught. Ponder on that. And then think about the idea that the first notice anyone might have that there is a noise issue involving them would be an armed police officer knocking on their door. Now police officers are a special case, have limits on their powers, etc. But there is still the implicit threat of force, otherwise they’d leave the guns at the office like Bobbie’s or in the car. How does that lower the temperature of the dispute? It’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
A few more points then I’ll end.
Intent. I think this is key and needs to be accounted for. In the three cases I’ve mentioned, the intent seems clear to disrupt the other neighbors using noise as the tool. Incidental noise as a result of doing other things is a different case. Peter mowing at midnight before the morning rains is different than a cyclist racing up and down the street tweaking the throttle to maximize noise. Any law that might need to be crafted needs to take this into account. Is the person making noise maliciously? Or can’t help it as a byproduct of some other activity? Taking into account communications, mitigation attempts, decibels, proximity and duration would all help inform this. If someone could but won’t take simple mitigation steps and refuses to negotiate, then perhaps that could be referred to a next step. It’s one situation if I mow the edge of my property by my neighbor’s house at noon. Kind of another if I habitually do it just as the kids go to bed.
Where is grace in all this? Grace is a social lubricant. We all bump and rub up against each other from time to time and whatever we can do to leave a little slack for each other and a bit of forbearance is helpful in making things go smoothly. One fear commonly expressed is that creating a wide and subjective net for an ordinance will erode the precious little grace we give each other around this issue. It’s one thing to have a noisy agricultural action, or a noisy band practice next door and go ‘what are you gonna do’ and grin and bear it for the duration. It’s quite another to have a law that may tempt one to think, “well, they made a law about it, might as well use it and see what happens”. What many fear will happen will be less grace, less community, less social cohesion, more conflict.
As a final thought, can we just agree that some things that happen in rural communities are just different than what happens in the city or the suburbs? Some people move here just to be able to do those things. It’s a core part of why they live here. Others move here and discover that it’s a little different than what they expected or maybe wanted. Yet if those things can’t happen here, where can they happen?
I’ll send this off and print a copy to hand out.
Looking forward to working with you all tonight.
Kevin