Nearly a year after residents voiced concerns about the City of Delaware’s noise ordinance and its inadequacy, the City Council voted on Monday to amend Section 509.10 of the Delaware Codified Ordinance.
Residents’ concerns stemmed from the Sand Bar Station, which is located at 59 Potter St. and often features live music outdoors. Once those concerns were raised to the council, the City began a lengthy process to determine which amendments to the ordinance would allow for comprehensive regulation of potential noise violations.
During the Jan. 22 Delaware City Council meeting, the council directed City staff to propose something other than the possibility of jail time as a penalty enhancement to multiple ordinance violations, recommending a fine of up to $1,000. As the ordinance was previously written, the maximum penalty was a $150 fine.
At that time, the City had also engaged a sound engineer to review the draft ordinance and provide feedback. The City received the recommendations of the sound engineer in April and updated its drafted ordinance to reflect those recommendations. Among the primary amendments was changing the location from which the sound will be measured in a complaint to where the sound is being received rather than where the sound is generated.
Other changes included adding a “secondary weighted decibel scale to create sound limitation violations for lower-level frequency sound,” and “changing the length of time over which the noise at issue will be measured from six minutes to three minutes,” according to a staff report.
The City also recommended a community ambient noise study be completed “to ensure the sound limitations included in the ordinance are tailored to the Delaware community…” The vendor conducting the study was identified in June, and the City received the study results earlier this month.
The study was conducted by Thornton Acoustics and Vibrations (TAV), a company based in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Over the course of three days from July 21-23, TAV placed noise monitors at five sites — Hayes High School; the Central Avenue, Pittsburgh Drive, and Cheshire Road fire stations, and City Hall — to measure the ambient noise levels.
Following the study, TAV recommended that sound levels should be measured for periods of 10 minutes and not exceed certain levels relative to the zoning of the area. Those maximum levels include a daytime maximum of 70 db(A) for business areas and 60 db(A) for areas zoned residential. The recommended levels for the night, which the study classified as the period from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., was 65 db(A) for business areas and 50 db(A) for residential areas.
During Monday’s meeting, Councilman Kevin Rider said he believes TAV’s recommended levels are low and motioned to amend the ordinance to increase the maximum levels by 5 decibels to feel comfortable passing the ordinance as it is currently written.
City Attorney Natalia Harris added a point of clarification on why the window of time required for sound measurement was changed from three minutes to five minutes in the City’s proposed ordinance amendment.
“Mr. Thornton had indicated during our consultation that 10 minutes would really be ideal, and as a team, we believe that to be too laborious for enforcement purposes,” she said. “He said five minutes, if we were to have to present one of these in court because they were challenged, a five-minute window would be sufficient to sustain its reliability as a measurement. So we didn’t randomly land on five minutes. That was a time period he said would be sufficient.”
The council voted unanimously to approve Rider’s amendment to add 5 decibels to the maximum levels before also voting unanimously to approve the amended ordinance.
Reach Dillon Davis at 740-413-0904. Follow him on X @DillonDavis56.
