Monthly Archives: August 2026

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Legislators didn’t allow local bans of gas-powered leaf blowers. Va. localities are doing it anyway.

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Members of Quiet Clean NOVA demonstrate the noise level of gas-powered leaf blowers on the grounds of the Capitol. Photo: Quiet Clean NOVA.

Three years in a row of losing in the legislature might persuade some people to give up trying to get what they want. For members of the group Quiet Clean Virginia, their losing record simply challenged them to seek another path to victory. 

Quiet Clean Virginia and its affiliate groups in Northern Virginia advocate for local bans on gas-powered leaf blowers, machines that are either essential to modern suburban living or the scourge of it, depending on your point of view. 

Their pollution-spewing, two-stroke engines are linked to asthma, heart attacks and even global warming, and their headache-inducing roar is the bane of the work-from-home set, parents of napping children and night-shift workers who must sleep during the day. 

But on the plus side, they are really good at blowing detritus off people’s lawns. 

These days electric leaf blowers can also move leaves around, with no pollution and less noise. So advocates believe the gas version should no longer have a place in dense, urban environments where clean air and tranquility are already scarce. 

Prohibitions have been in place elsewhere in the country for years, including in the District of Columbia since 2022, and in Maryland jurisdictions including Montgomery County since 2025. 

Many residents of Northern Virginia would like their region to be next. A survey conducted by Arlington County showed almost three-quarters of residents support a total ban.

The problem is that even Democrats in the General Assembly have balked at giving local jurisdictions the express authority to regulate or ban gas-powered leaf blowers.   

In a Dillon-Rule state like Virginia, localities have only the powers expressly delegated to them by the state. And the General Assembly has never said anything about what local governments can do about lawn care equipment. 

Bills to grant localities this power have failed repeatedly in the House and Senate, and the votes weren’t even close. According to Quiet Clean board member Margaret McKelvey, lawn-care companies and leaf blower manufacturers lobbied hard against the measure, asserting it would cause economic ruin. 

Still, the failure of the initiative wasn’t the end of the story. 

Legislation would have been nice, but was it actually necessary? The Virginia Code gives localities the power to adopt “such measures as it deems expedient” to secure the “health, safety and general welfare” of their residents, including through enforcement of noise ordinances. That seems like enough authority.

Indeed, Alexandria attorney Jamie Conrad, a supporter of the legislation, told me in a phone call that several legislators he spoke with felt localities already have sufficient authority to enact a ban under the police powers delegated to them in the Virginia Code, and this was why they voted against the bill. 

Proceeding cautiously, the City of Alexandria asked their  then-local delegate (and former vice mayor), Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, to request an opinion on the topic from then-Attorney General Jason Miyares.  

On August 12, 2024, Miyares replied with a letter confirming the city’s authority to ban gas leaf blowers simply by amending its noise ordinance. 

Miyares, a Republican, acknowledged that the General Assembly had voted down legislation giving local governments express authority to regulate leaf blowers, but cited case law in rejecting any inference of legislative intent from those outcomes as speculative. Alexandria, he concluded, was clearly within its rights to ban the equipment.

Alexandria used that green light to amend its noise ordinance in May of 2025 and begin an 18-month phaseout of gas leaf blowers. A full prohibition is set to take effect on November 17, 2026.

Miyares’ opinion had leaned heavily on the authority in Alexandria’s city charter, though the power of counties to enforce noise ordinances under the Virginia Code is similar. Nonetheless, Arlington chose to move more slowly, holding extensive outreach sessions and soliciting feedback. 

The county collected more than 3,500 written comments, the great majority of which favored a ban. Reading through the comments linked from the survey, noise is clearly the driving factor behind support for the ban, with pollution and health impacts as secondary concerns. 

Most opponents cite the financial impact to homeowners and lawn care companies from having to buy new equipment. Complaints about government overreach make up a small (but often colorful!) part of the negative feedback.  

Not surprisingly, Arlington’s survey also showed most lawncare companies oppose a ban, saying it would impose an economic hardship. More surprisingly, though, nearly one-third of companies said they were “very comfortable” with a total ban, suggesting that the electrification of leaf blowers is already underway. 

With that support, last month the Arlington County board amended its noise ordinance to ban gas-powered leaf blowers effective January 1, 2029. The 30-month lag time is intended as a transition period giving owners of gas equipment time to change their equipment as it wears out, a frequent suggestion in the comments. The county transitioned all of its own landscaping equipment to electric in 2025.  

McKelvey says other jurisdictions have been watching, but so far none have followed Alexandria and Arlington.

The path to do so is straightforward; most localities already have noise ordinances, and many already apply time restrictions and decibel limits to the use of loud machines. Fairfax County, for example, already bans the use of all lawn equipment between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. 

Lawn care isn’t alone; other loud activities also have time restrictions. Even dog parks have to close at night, and indeed the quiet hours for dogs are longer than those for lawn equipment. (Clearly, the dogs didn’t hire the right lobbyists.)

Still, localities will have no interest in banning gas leaf blowers as long as their residents don’t demand it. The idea likely won’t even be discussed in rural counties, unless as an occasion to ridicule Democrats. With technology on the side of batteries, the market will eliminate the two-stroke engine long before most governments do. 

That’s cold comfort to the exhausted parent whose colicky baby has just been jolted awake. When that happens, even an avowed libertarian may waver on the sanctity of lawn equipment choice. Politics crumble when the baby is screaming.  

As for whether Alexandria and Arlington have set off on a slippery slope to banning everything having to do with fossil fuels, McKelvey thinks not. For one thing, the price differential between gas-powered lawn mowers and electric is too great to make a similar restriction reasonable; for another, as I can attest, gas leaf blowers are just uniquely irritating. 

I asked Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, the House patron of the leaf blower ban legislation, whether he would put the bill in again next year, now that the localities that wanted it had gone ahead with their bans. 

He told me he hadn’t decided, but added, “I’m glad to see Arlington taking this step, and I hope it sets an example for other localities that want it.”

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on August 24, 2026.

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DEQ study throws cold water on data center development east of I-95 — and its delayed release becomes a problem for Spanberger

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Among the many environmental, energy and economic concerns about the unconstrained spread of data centers in Virginia, the impact on drinking water supplies has ranked fairly low. That changed suddenly last week, with the release of a report that the administration of Gov. Abigail Spanberger seems to have tried to suppress.   

In compliance with legislation passed in March of 2024, scientists at the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) studied the health of the largest aquifer in eastern Virginia. Their report concludes that the Potomac Aquifer can’t support any new industrial water withdrawals. That means no water-cooled data centers. 

The implications for data center developers are obviously bad. But for the governor, the consequences may be worse. The administration delayed releasing the report for six months beyond its January 1st deadline. In fact, it took an open records request from the Associated Press to pry the report out of Spanberger’s office. 

Spanberger wasn’t even in office on January 1, so outgoing Gov. Glen Youngkin and his DEQ director, Mike Rollband, bear responsibility for at least the initial delay. 

However, Spanberger retained Rollband to continue serving during her administration. And in the months since she took office, Spanberger, like Youngkin before her, has sided with the data center industry much more often than with its critics. 

Rollband himself has not commented on the delay. The Associated Press said a Spanberger spokesman “attributed delays in the report’s release to a backlog of outstanding items from the previous governor’s administration.” 

The delay matters. If the report had been released by its January deadline, it might have influenced the General Assembly’s consideration of bills this year aimed at protecting Virginia’s water resources from the unchecked growth of the data center industry, or even spurred tougher measures. 

The General Assembly passed legislation to require reporting on how much water data centers are using, but the House bill originally required disclosure upfront as part of the permitting process. Those tougher measures never made it into the final bill. 

If legislators had had the benefit of DEQ’s report in January, would they have settled for merely collecting data after the fact? 

Sens. Russet Perry, D-Loudoun, and Richard Stuart, R-KIng George, think not. On Thursday the two legislators sent Spanberger a letter asking her to convene a special session to consider new policies to rein in water use in the aquifer system. 

Yet the report’s conclusions are not actually a surprise.

It’s true that, unlike the arid West, most of Virginia has enough water most of the time to meet our needs. But this is not the case for the Virginia Coastal Plain, roughly the area east of I-95 overlying the underground Potomac Aquifer. There, heavy withdrawals of groundwater have for decades exceeded the ability of rainfall to replenish supplies. 

The depletion of the Potomac Aquifer has been a recognized problem for years among scientists and area leaders. Its consequences include sinking land, saltwater seeping into water wells in coastal areas and greater relative sea level rise that contributes to coastal flooding. 

Most seriously, groundwater depletion threatens the ability of the region to provide water to a growing population. 

The Hampton Roads region has even implemented an effort to inject treated wastewater into the aquifer to reverse (or at least limit) land subsidence. According to the DEQ report, all it would take to undermine that effort is one significant new industrial user like a gas plant or hyperscale data center – or a combination of the two.   

Underlining the seriousness of this conclusion is the fact that most of Virginia is currently  in a drought, one severe enough to warrant weekly meetings at DEQ. The agency’s online map shows that as of this writing, groundwater supplies in parts of the coastal plain have fallen to emergency levels.

The depletion of the aquifer has hindered development before. 

Back in 2019, concerns about groundwater depletion became an issue for two gas-fired power plants proposed for Charles City County, which would have relied on groundwater from the Potomac Aquifer to produce steam and provide cooling. 

At the time, DEQ proposed to grant one of the developers a temporary permit until a pipeline could be built to deliver enough river water. Following passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), however, the gas plant proposals were scrapped. 

Today, however, developers are proposing a new gas plant in Charles City to provide a data center with onsite generation. 

Developer Point One seems to think it has figured out a way around the VCEA’s limits on new fossil fuel generation by using 35 smaller gas turbines instead of a couple of big ones, and using the electricity to supply the data center directly instead of feeding energy into the grid. Whether it has discussed its water needs with DEQ is not clear. 

Polling in Virginia shows public opinion has turned sharply against data centers. Spanberger’s own popularity has also turned negative, and that might be due in part to her support for the data center industry. 

A poll released in July by the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University showed 72% of residents oppose the sales tax exemption for data centers that Spanberger fought to preserve.  

Although Republican legislators in Virginia have historically supported the data center industry in larger numbers than Democrats, they may be seeing a political opportunity. Republican Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield, sent a letter asking Spanberger for a “pause” on new data center approvals, citing the General Assembly’s failure to pass legislation he introduced to require site assessments. 

That puts Sturtevant on the same side as environmental groups like the Sierra Club that now see a temporary moratorium as the only way to slow the onslaught. Virginia Sierra Club data center chair Ann Bennett told me that while the DEQ report clearly makes the case against siting data centers east of I-95, “we need to protect all state waters.” 

With pressure from both the left and the right, Spanberger has the difficult job of balancing her support for data center development with her promises to protect the environment and make data centers “pay their fair share.” Her delay in releasing the DEQ report undermines her credibility at a crucial time.