Thanks to your support and the enthusiasm of many others, our petition about the Yonkers noise ordinance is rocketing upward. We’re now up to 123 signers and people are joining us by the hour.
It’s quiet out there in the city today, with only a few brave folks trudging to the store because they forgot to buy chips for the Super Bowl. Yet the noise campaign hums forward. We’ve spoken with City Council members and Yonkers residents, tweaked the www.quieteryonkers.org website, and sketched out a social media campaign to roll out soon.
I found an interesting noise saga in the Washington Post, recounting a neighborhood battle In Maryland pitting a group of residents against a couple with a large family who have hosted many big parties at their house. The couple is black and the opposing residents are both black and white. It’s a good story, raising provocative questions about race, local politics and of course noise.
I extracted one wonkish detail from the article. The woman who was on the receiving end of the noise complaints used her cell phone noise app to show that she wasn’t making excessive noise – this shows the value of having a decibel based ordinance, because noise is so subjective. In their county, the daytime max is 65 decibels and the nigh time max is 55 decibels.
Their noise battles could all be solved if they just moved up to Yonkers, where the daytime max is 85 decibels (4X louder) and the nighttime max is 65 decibels (2X louder).
