Local Government Gone Awry

Yesterday was a wonderful spring day, so I spent about an hour and half in the afternoon raking up leaves in the play yard. (Note that I didn't mention getting ALL the leaves raked, as the central feature of our play yard is a very large oak tree with a propensity for holding onto last year's leaves as long as possible in the most miserly way; consequently I'll be raking up newly dropped old leaves at least until mid-June.) At the end of that time I had a pile of loosely stacked dry leaves roughly the size of a small car. Ideally I could have tossed a match on the pile, watched them burn quickly, and been done with the whole lot in about twenty minutes or less.

Unfortunately our local city council in all their infinite wisdom (insert heavy sarcasm here) has decreed that today was not a good leaf-burning day. In fact the only acceptable days to burn leaves, according to the council, are the first seven calendar days of any given month. Never mind that the first seven days of March were cold, rainy, and extremely windy and therefore totally not conducive to leaf burning in any form. Supposedly the rationale for limiting burning had to do with a small handful of vocal residents who claimed that leaf smoke aggravated their respiratory conditions and that burning should be banned entirely. Since that is totally impractical for most of the population, they opted to limit burning to a specific calendar time frame.

The only problem is that their plan doesn't work. Had I been able to burn my leaves today they would have been gone and forgotten about. But legally they have to sit and wait for another two weeks before being burned. Of course it started raining about 4:30, so they are no longer dry and loosely packed. In the two weeks before April 1, they will continue to compact and be rained on, and develop huge quantities of various molds. When I am finally able to burn these leaves, the resulting fire will be dark, smoky, and full of mold spores; consequently creating much more respiratory inflammation than the same leaves burned dry would have done. Multiply that by 800 or so local households all burning on the same few days instead of spread out throughout the month, and the result is indeed irritating - even to those of us with healthy respiratory systems.

Some people have suggested that other methods of disposing of leaves should be employed and leaves should not be burned at all. It's a concept that's great theoretically but not so great in practice. Composting the leaves might be an option, except that our trees produce such a prodigious quantity that we would quickly find ourselves knee-deep in composting leaves throughout the entire yard (oak leaves don't break down readily - they easily take two to three times as long as some other leaves to decompose). Bagging the leaves and hauling them off is time-consuming as well as expensive since someone has to purchase the bags as well as the gasoline for the hauling vehicle. And so it is that I am left with a huge pile of wet molding leaves that I'm hoping to burn in April, as they will be much worse if I have to leave them until May.

Wouldn't it be nice if the city council would just admit that they made a mistake and repeal the burning ordinance?