PORT ANGELES — Consumer fireworks again will be on the firing line Tuesday at a City Council meeting.
Council members will hold the second of two required public hearings on a proposed ordinance banning the sale of the incendiary devices at a meeting that begins at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 321 E. Fifth St.
Then they will consider enacting the prohibition within the city limits.
It would take effect in 2016, a year from the date of passage.
Twenty-four people commented at the first hearing Feb. 17, when 14 speakers favored the ban, which is based on a similar ordinance in Lacey. Ten speakers were opposed.
Mayor Dan Di Guilio said Friday he expects the council to make a decision after Tuesday’s hearing “one way or the other.”
City Council member Cherie Kidd also said after the Feb. 17 meeting that she expected a decision this Tuesday.
Di Guilio, who has publicly expressed concerns about the impact of firework noise on his dog, would not comment on how he might vote.
“I’m trying to give everyone an opportunity to say whatever they have to say about it,” he said.
Speakers who favored the ban, which was proposed by the Port Angeles group Safer 4th of July, have said at council meetings that their neighborhoods have increasingly turned into “war zones” July 3-5.
They have said pets are traumatized, fire dangers lurk, war veterans are forced to relive combat and, in one case, a lamp post was destroyed.
Speakers against the ordinance have said the commotion is largely the result of fireworks that are already illegal but would be purchased whether or not a ban was in place from the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe and other area reservations where state laws have no impact.
Opponents say that the issue is enforcement, not fireworks, with some saying letting off fireworks is a right that should not be taken away from them.
Illegal use of fireworks — either those too dangerous to be legal or those set off before 9 a.m. or after 11 p.m. on the Fourth of July — is a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine.
Fire Chief Ken Dubuc said Friday he favors the ban.
“My recommendation clearly is that they approve it, so I’m hoping it goes in that direction,” Dubuc said.
The proposed law is based on a similar ordinance in Lacey, City Attorney Bill Bloor said Friday.
“We used it as a kind of template and did an ordinance that we thought was fitting for us here in Port Angeles.”
Bloor said he was directed by the City Council to draft an ordinance that allowed two types of fireworks: the display variety that requires the user to have a license and “small firework devices” as defined under the Washington Administrative Code.
According to WAC 212-17-030, small fireworks include snakes and glow worms, trick noisemakers, party poppers, “booby traps” that are similar to party poppers, snappers, trick matches, cigarette loads and “auto burglar alarms” that consist of a small tubes that whistle or smoke when ignited.
If the council enacts a ban, Port Angeles would follow Port Townsend as the second city on the North Olympic Peninsula to outlaw the personal use of fireworks.
Port Townsend Police Chief Connor Daily said his department gets the same number of fireworks complaints as before the ban was enacted in 2003.
“If it’s about the illegal use of fireworks, that has not gone down,” he said.
In addition, he said, the blatant use of fireworks in the city’s streets has not abated.
Cmdr. Chris Ward of the Lacey Police Department said Friday he likes having the added measure of a ban to control the use of fireworks.
But it’s hard to measure success, he said.
“The success for us in that we have that law built in to curtail it if we see it,” Ward said.
Still, only two tickets for illegal fireworks were written in 2014 compared, for example, to 10 in 2011.
There is no consistent pattern to fireworks complaints in Lacey, a Thurston County city of 45,000.
For example, Lacey police dispatch received 109 fireworks-complaint calls in 2009, the first year of the ban, compared to 127 in 2013 and 101 in 2014.
On the Forth of July alone, Lacey police received 64 complaint calls in 2009 compared to 77 in 2013 and 69 in 2014.
Some complaints have come from just outside the city limits, where the ban is not in effect.
Maddeningly, on one side of Martin Way, which borders the city, fireworks are legal, and on the other side, they are not.
Still, before the ban, streets would be filled with people with fireworks platforms blowing up fireworks.
“We don’t see that anymore,” Ward said.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
