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!"
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.