 Nancy Armstrong, left, and her partner, E.J. Zita, are pushing noise restrictions on dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles. (Richard Roesler/The Spokesman-Review) |
View video shot by Armstrong and Zita of the ORV track: |
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OLYMPIA – About three years ago, Nancy Armstrong noticed that her neighbor was carving up large parts of his back yard with a Bobcat excavator. She wondered what was going on.
She soon discovered that she lived next door to a homemade racetrack for dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles, some outfitted with loud aftermarket mufflers. The neighbors even hung up Budweiser pennants along the banked turns.
"They were blowing doughnuts, flipping dirt in the air, revving the engines coming out of the turns," Armstrong said. "You can't be doing something like that any more than you could buy an airplane and have it land and take off in your back yard."
On Wednesday, ATV fans and some of their unhappy neighbors will face off in Olympia at the first meeting of the state's new Task Force to Study Off-Road Vehicle Noise Management.
Annoyed neighbors like Armstrong are advocating statewide changes, such as tighter noise limits or a mandatory buffer of several hundred feet between the bikes and homes.
"People think that five acres is wilderness, but it's not. It's just not an appropriate place for racing unmuffled off-road vehicles," said Al Waldt, an Olympia sheep farmer and state engineer. "It's probably music to their ears, but it's awful to the neighbors."
ATV riders "have some clout, and they are willing to band together to use it. Which is good," said Sen. Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch, sponsor of one of the bills. He now says his bill, which included a 600-foot buffer zone and would have limited muffler noise to 96 decibels, was "much, much too restrictive."
Rep. Kathy Haigh, who sponsored a similar bill in the House, said she was stunned when ATV owners, eager to blast her bill, crammed the hallway outside a hearing room.
"I was like 'Kathy Haigh? I don't know her,' " joked Haigh, D-Shelton. "I had no idea what I was getting into."
She and Sheldon both quickly toned down their own proposals. Instead of new restrictions, the bills simply set up the task force to look into the issue of ATV noise. And while turning a bill into a study is often a face-saving way for lawmakers to quietly kill an idea, both Sheldon and Haigh say that they're committed to listening to both sides before deciding what – if anything – to do when the legislative session starts in January.
"The task force was not created to kill the issue," said another task force member, Sen. Karen Fraser, D-Olympia. "People living in residential areas dealing with this are not going to let it die."
ATV owners and dealers say that part of the problem is it's hard to find places to legally ride, especially as more and more people take up the sport. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council Retail Sales Report, a California-based industry publication, Washington sales of new ATVs and off-highway motorcycles grew 117 percent between 1999 and 2004.
"As we lose riding areas, it forces people back into their back yards," said Jeff Reiner, an Olympia ORV dealer.
For many folks, an ATV is the key to backcountry mobility, and a way for the family to spend time together.
"You see wildlife, you get the skill of going up certain hills, you learn to navigate slippery rocks and roots," said Reiner. It gets him out in the woods, but with a far greater range – 30 or 40 miles – than he could hike in a day.
"It's the wind in your hair, the speed," said Stuart Drebick, an Olympia builder who rides mostly on his own six acres. "It's better than sitting on the couch."
Drebick and others say that lawnmowers are far louder than many of the bikes, at least those with stock exhausts.
"My boy has a Suzuki 50 that is way quieter than my lawnmower and (under the state proposals) he wouldn't have been able to ride in my field," Drebick said. "That's ridiculous."
Armstrong says it's ridiculous that people have to live next to loud backyard racetracks. At first, she said, she and her partner, E.J. Zita, tried to talk to their neighbors about the problem. They brought over a basket of apples as a peace offering.
"The first thing they did was screamed expletives at us, said it was their property and they'd do anything they wanted," Armstrong said. She said the neighbor announced that he'd get an even noisier bike, just to spite her. The neighbors' kids, she said, took to shooting BBs at the couple's house.
After futilely complaining to the sheriff's office, the couple finally armed themselves with a decibel meter, videotapes and a lawyer. Seeing the tape, a judge issued a cease-and-desist order banning the neighbors from running the bikes on the backyard track.
Since then, Armstong and Zita have founded The Coalition Against ORV Nuisances. Through a Web site, they're helping similarly afflicted residents battle backyard ATV noise.
Last month, the group prodded Thurston County into limiting vehicle noise to 55 decibels – about the level of normal conversation – at the property line. There are more than a dozen exemptions, including lawnmowers and construction tools.
Andrea Fontenot has been battling ORV noise for two years. She and her husband live in their "dream home" on seven acres.
"This last Sunday, for two and a half hours, we had a two-stroke dirt bike going full throttle through our neighborhood, back and forth, back and forth," she said. She can't take a nap inside her own home, she said. The neighbors are unwilling to drive to a county-maintained ORV area, she said, that's just 10 minutes away.
"The motorcycle folks think they have property rights to make noise, but you don't if it disturbs other people's peace," said Waldt. "You can't shoot across someone's property. You can't empty your septic tank on someone else's property."
After Thurston County's ordinance, he said, his biking neighbors put stock mufflers back on, largely solving the problem.
In Mason County, Fontenot said she tried asking her neighbors to keep the noise down, she said, and was told she should move. The situation's particularly irksome to her husband, who races a dirtbike on closed-circuit tracks.
"These people are ruining the sport and giving it a bad name," said Fontenot, who's considering a lawsuit.
Drebick agrees that the problems – and the calls for restrictions – are caused by a noisy few.
"It comes down to a small minority who don't care – or who don't have parents who care," he said. Like Reiner, he worries that the result will be overly restrictive county or state regulations. Thurston County's new rule, both men say, is too limiting.
Some lawmakers say that part of the reason for the task force is to put ATV fans and manufacturers on notice that they're being looked at.
"One of the main things that I hope comes out of this (task force) is that the ORV riders realize they have to police their own," said state Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, who uses a trail bike for deer hunting.
"At least there will be some discussion of it," Armstrong said of the task force. "And we'll just be back every year. Sometimes that's what it takes."