Last week’s post about a noise nuisance problem in my back yard received a follow-up from Springfield Police Lieutenant Robert Moynihan, who tracked me down via the offices of the Valley Advocate in Easthampton. At first afraid that I had violated some ordinance against reporting difficulties with ordinances, I soon learned that Moynihan merely wished to find out when the noise problem was reported and for what location. He very kindly offered to find out what transpired, and why a cruiser was possibly not dispatched to the location at the time of the horrendous sound blasting we were experiencing in our yard.
Lieutenant Moynihan got back to me on Saturday morning, just as I was preparing to show my house for the umpteenth time to potential homebuyers (an impossible task when one is also raising children in the very house, especially on rainy, muddy days, where there is no safe haven for antsy bodies), and simultaneously preparing for a last-minute press conference called by the governor for that afternoon. Trying to hear the lieutenant over the din of the vacuum cleaner operated indoors, and the usual noise of traffic speeding by on my 25-mile-per-hour street, I learned that there actually had been some follow-up to our non-emergency call on Mother’s Day, May 13, around 1:00 pm.
At 13:08, Lieutenant Moynihan told me, a sector cruiser was dispatched to the offending location. Ten minutes later, the officer called back to report that he was not able to determine that the sound levels were unreasonable. Lieutenant Moynihan told me that he would advise the officer to investigate these complaints thoroughly and to take appropriate action when deemed necessary. That was reassuring, but at the same time, it’s all so relative.
It occurred to me that we have perhaps been far too tolerant of noisy neighbors, and so when a real problem emerges like on May 13, and we report it, the need for a satisfactory response becomes that much more acute. Not getting one is therefore that much more difficult and frustrating.
It’s relevant to current discussions, however, such as that taking place tonight at City Hall. The Springfield City Council has a draft revision of the city’s noise ordinance on its agenda, among other interesting items.
One of the questions about the noise ordinance is just how far away does one have to be for the noise to be considered unreasonable? The suggested distance is 150 feet, but when back yards are clustered close together, that’s a lot farther away from noise than I can get in my own yard, save just giving up and going inside.
The suggested language of "plainly audible" would appear to head in a more helpful direction of clear discernment, steering us away, thankfully, from the whole idea of what’s reasonable or not for a given neighborhood. Apparently, for my neighborhood, plenty of headache-inducing noise is reasonable enough.
