We are one step closer to accomplishing our goal: thoughtful, evidence-based noise limits in Yonkers. 

At the first candidates night event of the current political primary season, City Council President Lakisha Collins-Bellamy said she is “absolutely” open to taking a new look at the city’s noise policies.

The poorly conceived 2023 ordinance passed with a 5-2 vote, with Republican Council Members Anthony Merante (District 6) and Mike Breen (District 5) casting the two no votes. With Ms. Collins-Bellamy’s newly stated position, we may now have the necessary four votes to move toward a new and better ordinance.

As we moved our campaign forward earlier this year, Corazon Pineda-Isaac (District 2) became the first  Council Member to come out in favor of a noise redo.

At the Beczak Center candidates forum May 14, five of the six of the candidates came out against the higher noise limits. Even Council Member Tasha Diaz (District 3), architect of the limits and now also a candidate for Council President, stated that she would be open to a reconsideration of her own proposal. Ron Schutté, a Republican candidate for Council President, also supported a new noise policy.

Council Member John Rubbo (District 4) has declined to reconsider his support of the higher noise limits. 

Ms. Collins-Bellamy did not avoid a head-on confrontation with Ms. Diaz about the ordinance.  Ms. Collins-Bellamy said that she first decided to rethink her vote in favor of the ordinance after she learned — from this author –  that Ms. Diaz may have proposed it as part of a pay-for-play deal with a campaign contributor. [See further disclosure below]

The Council President also stated that she now questions Diaz’s main rationale for the noise limit increase: that it was intended to help residents of apartment buildings being subject to unfair noise complaints to the police, often as a tactic by rivals to have tenants evicted.

Ms. Diaz pushed back aggressively, doubling down on her claim about helping tenants in her district.. “It’s geared to the south side of Yonkers,” she said. “The cops were being called because it was an issue between neighbors, using the police as leverage to constantly call them so the person in their building can either get evicted or summoned. And if you know about buildings, in the leases there is a clause, in a lot of the buildings, stating that if your apartment is loud and you turn your TV up, that’s a cause you can get evicted for. You can go, the management can actually send you a letter pertaining to that.”

Ms. Diaz’s statement does not square with basic facts: the ordinance that she sponsored made no changes to noise levels allowed in multi-family dwellings. The only new noise levels in the revised city code relate only to residential-to-residential noise. This provides does nothing for Ms. Diaz’s harassed building tenants, but does quite a bit for the contributor who may have motivated Diaz’s proposal.

After offering her explanation, Ms. Diaz launched into an attack on Ms. Collins-Bellamy, echoing her earlier public accusations that Ms. Collins-Bellamy has improperly divided her time between her job as an attorney at the Municipal Housing Authority and her responsibilities on the Council.  Ms. Diaz’s criticisms were calmly delivered, but came across as an out of the blue, incoherent diatribe.  Here is a verbatim transcript:

“That person should have been at work at that time anyway,  because they do work for MHA [Municipal Housing Authority] and they work for the City of Yonkers, which is double dipping..Yeah..The person should have been at work at that time, ’cause we all know, um, from 8:30 to 4:00 the municipal housing is open. So if you can sit in City Hall all day and direct calls to other people, you know, you’re not working at City Hall, but you can’t come in at municipal housing, you can;t be in two places at once.”

The 2023 ordinance sponsored by Diaz may face revision, even without a Council vote. As we’ve reported elsewhere, it has come to light that the ordinance authored by Diaz contains serious drafting errors. After the ordinance was voted on and signed by the Mayor, these drafting errors were mysteriously changed when the ordinance was entered into the city code.

Quieter Yonkers has been fighting the ordinance since last fall. Major community groups have come out against the higher noise limits, as have members of a Mayoral environmental advisory group. Almost 700 residents have signed our petition calling on the Council to reverse thes 2023 vote. But it was not until Wednesday night that the campaign seemed to stand a good chance of success.

The candidate night event was sponsored by the venerable Hudson River Community Association and the Westchester Black Women's Political Caucus..

[Disclosure: Peter Cohn, author of this article and a founder of Quieter Yonkers, was a party to noise-related litigation with the Diaz contributor mentioned in the article. The noise ordinance adversely affected the settlement of that litigation.The donation and the donor’s interests are verifiable in campaign finance reports and court records.