Is the Isle of Palms City Council mired in the muck in its efforts to create a noise ordinance that will at least partially satisfy the needs and desires of a majority of the island’s residents, businesses and visitors? At least one Council member thinks that is the case, and, as a result, the Planning Commission has been given the opportunity to bring some clarity to an issue that has plagued city leaders for the better part of a year.
“We’re stuck in the mud,” said John Bogosian at the Council’s Aug. 22 meeting. “The path we are on I don’t think is going to yield a noise ordinance that helps this city in any way right now. I want to propose a different path.”
That path leads directly to the city’s Planning Commission, courtesy of one of its members, David Cohen, who explained in a lengthy letter to Council members why the ordinance they are currently considering won’t work. A retired electronics systems engineer, he spent 10 years of his nearly four decades in the Navy working with equipment designed to detect the presence of man-made noise.
“It either wouldn’t be enforced as written or it will be so strict that it would basically abate all noise on the island,” Cohen said of the city’s most recent version of its noise ordinance.
“In reading the proposed ordinance, several things hit me as being off, indicating this ordinance was piecemealed by someone not fully understanding what they were doing,” Cohen said in his letter. “Not blaming our staff, who copied it from Mount Pleasant who copied it from Greenville who I assume copied from somewhere else.”
Cohen pointed out in his letter that: the term decibel – a unit used to measure the intensity of sound – is defined in different ways in different parts of the ordinance; an appropriate definition of the term “plainly audible” is presented but not used anywhere else in the ordinance; the ordinance mentions a 52-year-old American National Standards Institute standard for sound meters and “sound meter technology has changed significantly since 1971”; and the ordinance relies on maximum decibel levels even though Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines are based on average noise levels.
“These and several other inconsistencies indicate the ordinance was written by someone with limited knowledge of measuring sound levels,” Cohen said. “Sometimes you are better off scrapping your approach and starting over, and it is my opinion this draft is at that point.”
In an interview later in the week, Cohen mentioned another issue that must be addressed.
A major sticking point in the Council’s deliberations since last September has been the rocky relationship between the Sweetgrass Hotel and nearby residents. Cohen said the hotel, located in a planned residential development in Wild Dunes, is technically zoned by the city as neither commercial nor residential.
“That’s a question that needs to be answered,” he said. “I think we can bring up the subject and at least come to a recommendation. Whatever gets enacted should not be detrimental to the rest of the island, either being too severe or not severe enough.”
The Planning Commission will meet again on Sept. 13.
Other Council members agreed that the Planning Commission should come up with recommendations on what the final version of the city’s noise ordinance should look like.
“Let’s give them a chance to see what they can do with it. I think we’re at an impasse right now,” Jan Anderson stated, while Rusty Streetman said that if the city hires an acoustics expert to study the situation – a scenario that was on the Council’s agenda Aug. 22 – “we’d be right back in the same spot we were before.”
Earlier in the meeting, during a discussion of a report on a noise survey conducted for Wild Dunes, Council Member Scott Pierce voiced his opinion on the Council’s inability to come up with an equitable noise ordinance.
“This foray we’ve had on trying to create a noise ordinance has been completely unsuccessful. I don’t know any other way to put it. We’ve got some work to do,” he said.
“We are serious about helping our neighbors and controlling the noise. We’ll do our part and have been doing it,” Terri Haack, senior vice president of Lowe, the company that manages Wild Dunes Resort, responded.
And Al Clouse, who lives near the Sweetgrass Inn, made what he said was his 20th presentation to the Council and its committees, asking that they do something about the noise emanating from the hotel.
“Where is everybody’s common sense?” he asked. “The sound study is smoke and mirrors, masking the real problem – the resort.”