L-R-Mike Khader, Councilwoman Tasha Diaz, Pete Spano, Churck Lesnick, Ron Schutte and Council President Lakisha Collins-Bellamy
Editor’s Note: The Hudson River Community Association held a City Council President’s debate on May 14 at the Beczak Educational Environmental Center. This is a story below on the debate that we found interesting.
A Major Step Closer To A Reconsideration of the City Noise Policy
By Peter Cohn
The effort to have the City Council reconsider the 2023 noise ordinance which drastically increased the city’s noise limits may now have majority support on the City Council.
Speaking at the first open candidates night of this election cycle, City Council President Lakisha Collins-Bellamy stated that she is “absolutely” open to taking a new look at the city’s noise policies. The Council President’s position makes it highly likely that there will be at least four votes in the Council to reopen discussion, the needed majority in the seven vote chamber.
Five of the six candidates at the Beczak Center event came out against the higher noise limits. Even Council Member Tasha Diaz (District 3), architect of the limits and now also a candidate for Council President, stated that she would be open to a reconsideration of her own proposal.
The current vote count in the Council includes the two Council Members who originally voted against the ordinance: Republicans Anthony Merante (District 6) and Mike Breen (District 5). Council Member Corazon Pineda-Isaac (District 2) was first to come out in favor of a reconsideration, while Council Member John Rubbo has adamantly refused to reconsider his support of the higher noise limits. Deana Robinson (District 1) has not responded to numerous requests for her position
Ms. Collins-Bellamy did not avoid a head-on confrontation with Diaz about the ordinance. Ms. Collins-Bellamy said that she first decided to rethink her vote in favor of the ordinance after she learned — from this reporter– that Ms. Diaz may have proposed it as part of a pay-for-play deal with a campaign contributor. [See further disclosure below]
The donation and the donor’s interests are verifiable in campaign finance reports and court records.
The Council President also stated that she now questions Diaz’s main rationale for the noise limit increase: that it was intended to help residents of apartment buildings being subject to unfair noise complaints to the police, often as a tactic by rivals to have tenants evicted.
Ms. Diaz pushed back aggressively, doubling down on her claim about helping tenants in Southwest Yonkers. “It’s geared to the south side of Yonkers,” she said. “The density over there is higher. People live closer together. And after Covid people have gathered and, yes, the noise levels have gone up. And the cops were being called because it was an issue between neighbors, using the police as leverage to constantly call them so the person in their building can either get evicted or summoned. And if you know about buildings, in the leases there is a clause, in a lot the buildings, stating that if your apartment is loud and you turn your TV up that’s a cause you can get evicted for. You can go, the management can actually send you a letter pertaining to that.”
Ms. Diaz’s statement has very little credibility: the ordinance that she sponsored made no changes to noise levels allowed in multi-family dwellings. The only new noise levels in the revised city code relate only to residential-to-residential noise. This provides little relief to Ms. Diaz’s harassed building tenants, but does provide relief to the contributor who may have motivated Diaz’s proposal.
After offering her explanation, Ms. Diaz launched into an attack on Ms. Collins-Bellamy, echoing her earlier public accusations that Ms. Collins-Bellamy has improperly divided her time between her job as an attorney at the Municipal Housing Authority and her responsibilities on the Council.
Ms. Diaz’s criticisms were calmly delivered, but came across as an out of the blue, incoherent diatribe. Here is a verbatim transcript:
“That person should have been at work at that time anyway, because they do work for MHA [Municipal Housing Authority] and they work for the City of Yonkers, which is double dipping..Yeah..The person should have been at work at that time, ’cause we all know, um, from 8:30 to 4:00 the municipal housing is open. So if you can sit in City Hall all day and direct calls to other people, you know, you’re not working at City Hall, but you can’t come in at municipal housing, you can;t be in two places at once.”
The 2023 ordinance sponsored by Diaz may face revision, even without a Council vote. As we’ve reported elsewhere, it has come to light that the ordinance authored by Diaz contains serious drafting errors. After the ordinance was voted on and signed by the Mayor, these drafting errors were mysteriously changed when the ordinance was entered into the city code.
Quieter Yonkers has been waging a campaign against the ordinance since last fall. Major community groups have come out against the higher noise limits, as have members of a Mayoral environmental advisory group. Almost 700 residents have signed a petition calling on the Council to reverse thes 2023 vote. But it was not until last night that the campaign seems to stand a good chance of success.
The ordinance made the city’s daytime noise limit eight times louder, and the night time limit was doubled. The new limits are well beyond levels recommended by health and public policy experts, and give Yonkers one of the least restrictive noise ordinances in the US. The new ordinance revises an ordinance passed by the Council in 2005. Diaz, Rubbo and other advocates of the increased noise limits stated that the existing ordinance was “old” and therefore in need of revision. In fact, the 2005 ordinance was carefully considered by the Council, with major input from leading regional noise policy experts at Rutgers.
The candidate night event was sponsored by the venerable Hudson River Community Association and the Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus..
[Disclosure: Peter Cohn, author of this article and founder of Quieter Yonkers, was a party to noise-related litigation with the Diaz contributor mentioned in the article. The noise ordinance adversely affected the settlement of that litigation.]
