My father is a licensed landscape contractor in Menlo Park (the same place where this law change was written). For 30 years I have watched (and helped) him with jobs almost always involving small off-road internal combustion tools. He works 6 day work weeks and easily 10h+ a day. His small truck fleet not only includes lawn mowers, blowers, and edge cutters, but also a trencher, a compactor, and a couple pumps.
As well intentioned as this law change is it will only make a hard job even harder. Battery cost, battery swaps and reparability, battery theft, arguing with locals who still will still yell at him for being "too loud".... it's just not going to happen or be worth it. He will continue to buy tools from places with lower sales tax and there is no possible way you can argue that an electric trencher or compactor is going to work for more than a couple hours a day without a repeated battery swaps. Have you even seen how large the properties are in Woodside, Atherton, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, and Cupertino? Those kinds of jobs are impossible with electric tools. Sorry, not sorry.
For example: For a number of years Palo Alto has had a law about gas leaf blowers (Ordinance No. 4634, I think). The "easy" way around it is to use an electric leaf blower. Where do you plug in an electric leaf blower in Palo Alto? Probably the same place as where the public trash can is: Nowhere. You've got to use the customer's house. Not every customer has an outdoor socket. Try explaining that to a customer: The city you live in voted to 1) Make me plug in my outdoor tool inside your house. 2) Use your electricity instead of my gas. 3) Make the job take longer. Helping a customer "understand" why they're going to see an extra dollar on their electricity bill and inconvenience every 2-4 weeks is harder than you'd think. The people of Palo Alto don't like being told they're wrong or what they have chosen costs more money. I have seen with my own eyes people forego service because of a $10 monthly increase after multiple of great service.
Long story short: People like to vote against themselves. People are not reasonable.
This is so collossally stupendously irrelevant it's not funny.
How many batteries would it take to run your toy lawnmower for 10 hours? How much would those batteries weigh? How much would thos batteries cost? How long would it take to charge them all? Now multiply all that by about 10 or more for an ordinary bog standard small landscaping crew with several similar peices of equipment and several significantly larger than a homeowners toy mower. Now multiply that by all the landscaping crews. and the simple weight of all the dedicated battery trucks on the roads would be significant let alone the process of manufacturing them.
We do need to go as electric as possible but we don't actually posess the storage technology to do it yet. Swapping out a battery still doesn't come close to refilling a tank.
The functionality is not remotely equivalent yet.
Treating fantasy land as reality instead of a goal does not help us get to the goal. It just gives totally legitimate ammo to anyone who wants to say "Wow the libs are so stupid". Congratulations on that. Thanks for helping.
When the next guy comes and tells them the same thing, they're going to understand, and now neither they nor your father will be breathing the noxious fumes. People are perfectly reasonable.
I sympathize with the landscape contractors, but the type of landscaping that requires small engines to maintain isn't really needed. I grew up in a rural house with no decorative landscaping, just weeds and trees. When leaves fell off the trees we left them there. It was fine.
I live adjacent to two large institutional properties that have lots of trees. I'd really like them to consider alternate means of dealing with leaves that are not aggravating to their neighbors and probably are better for their trees, like mulching or something. One way to encourage this is to make it cost more for them to do traditional groundskeeping. I don't feel bad about placing a bigger burden on groundskeepers that makes them have to charge more on this situation
(One is a private college, one is a religious institution, I don't really feel bad about them being pushed to be better neighbors as they manage their leaves)
Say that to the acidic invasive Eucalyptus leaves eating away at the paint on your car, or leaving stains on your paved walkway, or choking out your pretty wildflowers.
Or maybe take it up with the Bigleaf Maples clogging up the storm drain front of your house causing water to slowly creep up your poorly graded property on Middlefield Rd.
Or maybe the pine needles that turn brown and look like garbage on your lawn.
A lot of leaves suck to deal with. Blowing is the what the property owners want.
... or to the piles of maple and oak leaves outside my home. If not disposed of, they'll accumulate alongside the leeward base of the walls of my house and end up being a fairly major fire hazard.
One thing you might point out to your father is that his choice of dirty obsolete technology is exposing himself and his workers to dangerous levels of carcinogenic crap all day long, taking years off their lives. Not to mention the hearing loss.
If he wants to keep using them he should at the least be requiring his employees to wear high quality gas masks and hearing protection.
Otherwise, the health effects are comparable to mandating all of his employees take up smoking cigarettes while on the job.
If individual home owners want to take a risk with their lives while doing occasional lawn care that is one thing, but this kind of unnecessary occupational hazard should be strictly banned, and should open employers to criminal/financial liability.
It's not a choice. This comment is only possible from ignorance. It's fine not to know things. It's not fine not to know things and talk about them, and worse, other people, anyway.
If you think landscapers have no choice but to use machinery that is literally poisoning them – because they can’t otherwise compete with all the other landcapers who are willing to poison themselves – then a government ban on these toxic devices becomes even more important! There is a serious social justice problem here: poorly paid, disempowered, often undocumented immigrant landscaping crews are putting their health on the line for the convenience for rich people’s often unnecessary garden maintenance.
But it is certainly a choice not to provide essential safety gear (in this case, high quality respirators and hearing protection) to employees who are doing dangerous work. These 2-stroke motors are particularly difficult to guard the ears against, because they make very loud low-frequency sounds.
The same kind of argument you are making here (via passive aggressive insults rather than direct statement, I might add) could justify pretty much any occupational health hazard. Thankfully regulators and the voting public have over the years regulated some of the worst abuses out of workplaces. Hopefully soon gas-powered leaf blowers will be among those in the dustbin of history.
> "As well intentioned as this law change is it will only make a hard job even harder. Battery cost, battery swaps and reparability, battery theft"
Yes, absolutely.
If we have any hope of reducing our impact on the planet, some parts of our lives are going to get less convenient / more expensive / harder / more time consuming. At least in the short term, switching away from burning dinosaur oil will be a little painful.
Our grandchildren will appreciate that we tried, rather than sitting around saying "it's too hard!"
“To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Ford Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska.”
That's totally insane. I switched to Ego yard equipment maybe 5 years ago and it's so much better. I don't have to screw around trying to get the weedwhacker to run, nor the blower vac. No plumes of sooty smoke when I start the lawn mower. It all "just works".
I don't have a big yard, but the Ego stuff handles it well. My only gripe is in the fall (New England, so lots of leaves) I only really get 15-20 mins of runtime on the blower. Having said that, I have several other batteries including the big one for the mower so by cycling through them I can get the cleanup done.
I think that for a landscaping company, it'd be tough to go (battery) electric, at least without having a big library of batteries. Doable, but probably takes some commitment to the environment vs profit.
I've recently had to switch to the Ego "electric" neon green stuff, and it's a definite step down from the red commercial Maruyamas.
Electric weedwhacker (I'm assured these don't exist on the West Coast, but they do have an alternative called the "weedeater") barely has any strength behind it.
Will it knock down some tall spots in the hard spots of a non-artificially-planned backyard? Yes.
Will it be quick? No.
Can you edge with it? I've tried, but the lack of power means the cut is never clean.
Same with the leafblowers.
Gasoline-powered? That side-walk and driveway are free of leaves in 5 minutes tops.
Electric? I'm slowly walking around like a bozo for a good 15-20 minutes just to get the bigger parts. It's almost impossible to get all the nooks and crannies with the hand-blower.
Same with the trimmers.
Hell. Those small Maruyama trimmers are all you need. Doesn't matter if you need a longer reach: a ladder and one-handing it always does the trick. Admittedly, they're also used as pruners (and they're damn good at it).
I've tried those pole-trimmers, and the lack of power was palpable. You can barely even cut through Rhododendron without slamming that thing into the branches.
Electric? Forget about it. They barely cut through my regular-variety hedge.
Perhaps the "high-powered" stuff has spoiled me forever -- and I do miss them dearly. What I don't miss is my hands going numb, and a persistent ringing in my ears.
I've also grown to be a fan of the "old" New England property landscapes and yards. The ones on the West Coast always seemed so artificial.
Well, importantly, or not so importantly. Focus on CO2 over pollutants that actively harm the health of everyone in the vicinity is the same scam that got us diesel cars.
In the Raptor's case, the ambient air contained 2.821 ppm of total hydrocarbons, and the amount of total hydrocarbons coming out the Raptor's tailpipe measured 2.639 ppm.
What's the point of comparing small outdoor engines to things that don't emit hydrocarbons?
I find this hard to believe. I remember mowing the lawn for my parents, powering my ridealong lawn mower with a few gallons of gas for an hour or two (or maybe 30 minutes, I don't remember how long it took me). My car, at best, would drive for an hour on a few gallons of gas. So about the same amount of time. What gives?
The test is measuring emissions, not efficiency. From the link:
The Results
During the FTP 75 test, exhaust gas from the vehicle's tailpipe is captured and analyzed by laboratory-grade equipment that's so expensive it makes the Kentucky Derby look like the Pinewood Derby. This lab equipment measures all kinds of compounds coming out of the tailpipe but the three we will focus on are those with which EPA and CARB are primarily concerned, namely, non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC), oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO).
The 2 stroke leaf blower is literally burning oil to run, so the emissions are much, much worse. (that's how 2 stroke engines work).
Also note your ride on mower (and other small IC things) don't have catalytic converters or anything at all to manage emissions, so the stuff coming out the exhaust is multiple orders of magnitudes worse - especially for the user who is standing right there breathing it in.
It isn't just about gallons consumed per hour, it's about what comes out the exhaust.
Your car has a good engine (mostly because it's regulated). Your lawnmower has the cheapest possible engine that will spin a blade.
The cheap two cycle engine does exhaust and injection in the same cycle. Inevitably a large fraction of the injected fuel is also exhausted. How that tired back to green house gases I'm not totally sure, but it's certainly very bad for your lung health to breathe it!
The typical small two-stroke engine has two big problems that cause hilariously bad emissions:
1) The lubricating oil is mixed into the fuel and burned in the combustion cycle. The combustion products of this oil are not clean.
2) They combine exhaust and intake into a single "stroke", i.e. the downstroke after ignition, which can result in unburnt aerosolized fuel escaping with the exhaust.
Additionally, fuel injection systems can typically achieve better emissions than carburetors can. AFAIK small two-strokes (and some four-strokes like small outboard motors, etc.) are largely the last bastion of carburetors in engines manufactured today.
While not terrible, that doesn't seem favorable for the gas leaf-blower. Most people use yard equipment once a week or more for that long during depending on season.
So using a leaf-blower for 30 mins once a week for 12 weeks has the same emissions as driving a extremely inefficient truck for 45k miles?
I wouldn't have supported this a few years ago, but working from home now and surrounded by people operating 2-stroke leaf blowers all day, I'd be pretty happy never to hear one again. It would be better to regulate noise and / or emissions vs the specific technology, but that's probably too much to ask.
Same here - but years prior as I was remote then too. One particular lady, every day in the fall, would climb on a ladder and use a leaf blower to try to clean leaves from the gutters. Like, hours of leafblower a day. I'm not a violent person, but that noise was so aggravating I had daydreams of kicking that ladder over.
To this day, I don't understand why cities or neighborhoods don't at least limit the days they can be used. Everywhere I've lived, someone in earshot is mowing or blowing every...single...day.
No. Battery powered does not have an engine, it only has a motor. The engine in a gas-powered device is where the combustion happens, and that combustion causes much louder noise than an electric motor. Same as the sound of an electric car vs. gas-powered.
That's my point about regulating the noise, not the tech. But objectively, I the electric ones I have heard are way more quiet (though still obnoxious). The gas ones basically sound like a chainsaw, and are louder and have more jarring harmonics.
I think you're right. Googling around most of the sound is generated by the air movement, but ICE blowers seem to be ~1-3 decibels louder, but may be a bit more powerful.
Electric leaf blowers are much quieter from my experience. The gas powered motor itself generates a lot of the noise.
Making them illegal didn't seem to help in LA where the gardeners still defiantly use the gas powered blowers with zero repercussions. Hopefully you'll have better success outlawing them in your community.
You have to start somewhere, the easiest way is to ban new sales as that is what you can enforce without too much expense (both financial and political). Then as old machines slowly fail, most people will buy new electric ones. And if there are still 100s or 1,000s of people stubbornly using their petrol powered tools, at least there are no 100,000s or 1,000,000s of them.
The electric motors tend to be quieter and also weaker. But there are also newer models that are more powerful. And they do generate noise, but it sounds more like a hushed vacuum cleaner rather than the typical leaf-blower sound. If you want to hear the difference check out this particular timestamp of this comparison video (https://youtu.be/UUQeGzGy0Ds?t=397). The gas powered blower is ~5 dB louder at peak. The electric one is at 78 decibels peak (max power with "turbo") but the gas powered blower measures at 78 decibels just idling. The reviewer notes that the electric one is very bearable for him as an operator, but the gas powered one is too loud to think clearly.
That particular model of leaf blower with the backpack is fairly powerful, and the reviewer notes it pushes more air than the gas powered one he is using. However, a number of comments mention that the gas powered blower is much more powerful and that the reviewer is biased, which may be apparent from his early praise for the electric model.
The big issue is that the electric blower's runtime is limited. He gets 22 minutes out of a full battery using it "normally", which takes 1 hour 40 minutes to charge on the standard charger, and 42 minutes on the fast charger. He concludes that electric is better in every way for homeowners, and there's no reason to go back to gas unless you are a commercial user (presumably due to the battery limitations).
> The electric motors tend to be quieter and also weaker. But there are also newer models that are more powerful.
Reminds me, couple of years ago I tried estimating what it would take to run a steamer to kill weeds. Felt like you could do it off a 240VAC 30amp circuit but not a 120V 15/20 amp one. Trouble while more modern houses have exterior outlets, none have 240V. Then again, EV chargers can deliver that.
Maybe the solution for gardeners is run power of an electric truck like the new Ford one.
The new F-150 Lightning has generated a lot of buzz, if they can deliver in 2022 (that is, ship in volume despite the chip shortage) it will be a game changer.
I'm sure the small gardening contractors will raise the issue of cost, but the large landscaping companies should have no excuse.
My real concern is that they will only be able to ship a limited run, which will get snapped up by the early adopters, that is the truck enthusiasts and EV fans who have enough disposable income and the patience to just get in line and wait.
Electric versions of lawn tools are much quieter. I switched to a battery powered lawn mower this year, and it barely makes more noise than a box fan you'd put in a window. With my old gas mower that was a similar size, I had to wear hearing protection over top of ear buds just to be able to hear any music.
It uses magnetic field to spin the rotor, so it can be completely silent. A gas engine, on the other hand, has to use a bunch of mechanical parts and belts, in addition to cylinders burning fuel, and those are noisy.
Try getting maple seeds (the helicopters) or pine needles off 2-8 week old grass seedlings with a rake (to prevent the grass seedlings from being smothered).
Gas blowers make light work of heavy, wet leaves. It’s why the landscapers use them rather than electrics.
Electric leaf blowers average 65db, 4 strokes are 70-80db, while 2 strokes average 90db. Where 10db is roughly double the "noise" I think this qualifies for "significantly"
The quietest reviewed blower in that article has about 40% the power of an Echo 755 gas blower (similar volume flow at 62% the speed; power is quadratic with speed and linear with volume).
It is not at all surprising that it’s much quieter as a result of putting ~40% of the energy into the stream of air.
Agree with you on the string trimmers and mowers being quieter in a way that’s meaningful. (I particularly love my battery string trimmer since I spent more time working on than using my gas one.) I have a plug-in chainsaw and it’s also quiet but it’s Fisher-Price sized so I can’t fairly say either way.
The blowers I’d encourage you to look up the specs and make sure your quiet electric has the power your loud gas one had before finalizing your conclusion on sound output per air output. I doubt it has even half the power (unless your gas blower was a particularly small four-stroke).
I bought two plug-in blowers (both were bad jokes, being limited to 1.4kW of input power by the outlet) before buying a gas blower. I’ve since tried two battery blowers of friends and one of those was okay but still noticeably slower and less powerful than my gas blower (the other was similar to the plug-ins: suitable for dry leaves on smooth concrete).
I’m not at all opposed to electric tools (especially since small seasonal gas engines are a pain to keep running well); in fact I prefer them. But I haven’t found a blower that’s competitive in power and I’ve got maple seeds to move from 3” bluegrass in the wet New England fall and I’ve not found an electric that can do it.
The Ego blower I have is 615 cfm, which is at the higher end compared to most gas powered blowers (450-650cfm).
However, the battery life isn't great, you get maybe 15 mins on a charge of those smaller 2ah batteries (but I have several along with a bigger 4ah mower battery). Perfectly fine for my yard, but not practical for a landscaper.
Everyone just buys them out of state. There’s literally an entire market for it now. And since most the people using them are immigrants no one is going to seriously back a law banning them from use unless they want to be a named racist. It’s all just a show.
I don't understand why CA keeps passing these sorts of laws. It makes them a subject of ridicule, the laws are more or less completely ignored, and the underlying structural problems behind the issue are never solved. If they really wanted to be "progressive" on Climate Change, they could discourage buying and shipping cheap goods from overseas. But that might make their wealthy donors unhappy.
CA is the land of show, and things like banning straws and gas mowers don’t inconvenience the rich donors and voters - in fact it sounds good to them - and so it’s done.
"People are circumventing a law that attempts to protect the environment, therefore we shouldn't even bother".
Yes, of course people will always look for ways around a law.. but if even 50% can't be bothered to go around it, that will be an enormous reduction in emissions.
But look at zoning in CA and the infinite logjam of traffic on the highways. I hardly doubt leaf blowers make anywhere near a dent policies that a really affect people’s lives would. It’s a joke really.
Look elsewhere in this thread, your gut feeling is very, very wrong:
"To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a Ford Raptor for 3,887 miles, or the distance from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska"
Why is there such demand for the ICE ones? The electric ones are cheaper (new at least) and cost a fraction of the operating and maintenance cost. Plus you can now have good reason to ask for outlet/power access at job sites so you don't even pay that cost anymore.
This probably doesn't effect used /existing stock either.
To your point about an outlet - what about jobs where this would require a couple hundred feet of line?
My landscaper recently told me the gas ones are still far more effective. I assume he would know? They go from site to site every day, I’m guessing they don’t have time to charge and want the best tool for their job as all of us do.
I was talking to my landscaper recently about them. Said they’ve improved but still not as good as an ICE. And they work on efficiency. I assume he knows what he’s talking about as every landscaper near me uses gas. If electric was a better option I assume they’d use them.
I'm happy to see California do this and hope other states wise up to the damage being done by these pollution machines. Drives me bonkers every week as neighbors and their landscapers fire up gas powered leaf blowers, edge trimmers and lawnmowers. Not only are they polluting the air and creating a noise nuisance, but for most yards they are using up a valuable energy resource for a task better suited for hand or electric tools. Think of how much more enjoyable yard work would be if you didn't have to listen to the deafening roar of everyone's internal combustion engines all the time. Rakes, push mowers and pruning shears aren't that much more effort - and most of us could use the extra exercise. If I charged these landscapers for all my lost productive time due to their noise and the impacts on my health from all the dust/noise/air pollution, an investment in batteries or extension cords looks pretty cheap.
I’m glad California is doing this. I don’t live in Cali so I don’t have to endure the initial scramble of figuring out compliance. I hate yard equipment gas engines. With a fiery burning passion. Most comments below think it’s either gas or battery, but plug-in equipment is great. Much quieter, more powerful than battery, cable management is kinda annoying but there’s an art to it.
Commercial equipment is a tough deal though, you can’t get enough amps on a 300 ft extension cord for a commercial-quality powered motor, which makes me wonder if this legislation could push foreword innovation to, maybe, create higher-grade plug in equipment that either utilizes a flywheel to increase cutting power at the expense of torque, or uses a combo battery and cord to temporarily boost power as needed.
Thing to remember is the article linked is basically a propaganda outfit. They claim a lot of thing but don't link to the law itself. The law is basically enabling legislation that requires the state air resources board to develop regulations and a system of rebates and incentives for commercial users to transition to zero emissions equipment.
The Heartland Institute, according to the Institute's web site, is a nonprofit "think tank" that questions the reality and import of climate change, second-hand smoke health hazards, and a host of other issues that might seem to require government regulation. Heartland Institute is an "associate member" of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 49 states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Electric lawnmowers and leafblowers have come such a long way. My electric lawnmower weighs next to nothing, needs virtually no maintenance, and it is only about as loud as a box fan. I get 2-3 mows out of it on a single charge, and the upfront cost was on par with (if not a little less than) an ICE lawnmower. There is no reason to not move aggressively in this direction.
Imposing the same rule on small backup generators seems premature, but that might be my perspective, where losing power for an extended period during the winter here would be bad (not that I have a generator, there's just not anything that I see as a particularly viable alternative, especially dollar for dollar).
> Proponents of the law users of electric power equipment will save money over time because the amount of electricity used to charge the batteries or power the equipment is cheaper than the cost of fossil fuels for comparable usages.
...if that was truly the case, then wouldn't battery powered equipment have won the market already?
The fact of the matter is I have battery powered lawn equipment. It barely can handle my 1/4 acre yard before giving out. Recharging the batteries takes hours, and the batteries love to flake out and refuse to charge.
In particular, I'm skeptical of the real expected cost savings over time. Electricity is cheaper than gasoline, but batteries for portable equipment tend to be very expensive, and how long do they last? Especially since manufacturers have historically changed the battery interface substantially every few years, forcing people to upgrade their equipment. Maybe that's changing, though, it does seem like the latest iteration of DeWalt batteries have been around considerably longer than the previous generation was.
I've bought three of them -- I'm actually using DeWalt because of that. But the batteries all arrived and refused to charge. I probed them with a multimeter, and found the cell voltage was quite low. Hooking it up to a constant current lab supply for ~30 minutes raised the cell voltage enough to get the charger to accept it... but I've only had one run with them. I hope they'll work again.
I'm a heavy DeWalt user and I'm already a little salty sometimes about how much they charge for their batteries. If they change up the standard again so I need adapters or new tools, I'm going to switch manufacturers altogether. So far I like their stuff well enough, thankfully I haven't run into any problems with new batteries not working out of the box yet. Knock on wood
> always wait for a sale or deal and get the batteries free with tool
I agree. I don't think I've ever paid full price buying a battery by itself. I just can't stomach the terrible value. I watch for a sale and pick up a new tool with the battery I want. I've got a few relatively obscure tools that way that I'd probably not bother purchasing otherwise.
It's price segmentation - they know that a contractor/employee who needs a battery ASAP will pay sticker price, whereas homeowners will wait for a sale.
But they didn't decree that "everybody will now use this technology". They just outlawed something harmful. You're quite free to hire a goat, use a rake, plenty of options.
I think this is actually the system working. The benefits of a tiny proportion of the population (lawn care companies) don’t outweigh everyone else. As a whole, the people decided that clean air and less noise pollution warranted a change. Maybe it will cost more in the near term to achieve those goals. But, it’s a level playing field. The costs will not be borne by the lawn care companies but by society at large. If the price of providing lawn care truly goes up then all lawn care providers will charge more. Society at large was already paying the costs of air / noise pollution.
I've used extension cord based equipment in several countries (places with large lawns and places with small lawns). You do have to keep track of the cord at all times (lest you mow the cord in two) , but it's not a huge bother.
Just because something is better (by various metrics) doesn't mean it will have "won the market". That's never been how things have worked, "the market" is far from perfect.
This is so ham-fisted and out of touch and politically stupid. The way to achieve things like this is to finance superior alternatives so that the undesired technology is naturally, organically abandoned
Why not just make an incremental step like banning two stroke leaf blowers. I don't understand. Is consistent incremental progress too complicated for the big brain law makers?
"Battery-powered yard care tools typically costs $100 to $250 more costly than comparable gasoline and diesel fueled equipment."
I've hesitated to buy battery powered lawn equipment because consumer reviews seem to suggest the batteries last for 4 or 5 seasons, then go bad. The batteries cost a significant fraction of what the whole system costs, so you end up buying a new lawn gadget and throwing away the entire old one (bad battery and all).
They shouldn't ban generators in particular, because those enable people to buy all the other electric devices regardless of whether the power grid is reliable.
guess what, ya don't need a goddamned cut grass lawn.
we are putting in ponds and forest gardens starting next year. no more yard.
downvote away, but these are exactly the kind of austerity measures required to get used to (and MUCH MUCH more) in order to realistically get things on track.
HOAs are one thing, but what cities mandate lawns in CA? My city (or maybe county) was paying people to get rid of lawns in one of the recent drought years.
Gasoline-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers to be banned under new California law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830968 - Oct 2021 (25 comments)
California moves toward ban on gas lawnmowers and leaf blowers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28819696 - Oct 2021 (147 comments)