Photo by Sarah Finnegan.
Stewart Welch
Stewart Welch
Who in the world is mowing lawns in the middle of the night in our city?
As crazy as this sounds, the answer is, “We are!”
Parks and Recreation Director Shanda Williams is helping transform Mountain Brook into a ‘quiet’ community. She and Public Works Director Ronnie Vaughn have converted to electric blowers for our villages and parks. So, the loud sound that you don’t hear is them blowing leaves.
We have a third-party vendor doing some of our blowing (with gas blowers) in the villages, and we are working with them to ‘go green’ as well. They may occasionally have to use a gas blower for heavy, wet leaves during winter months.
What’s the deal with the middle-of-the-night mowing? Williams recently ordered a sophisticated robotic lawn mower for the city. It uses GPS guidance to map out the area to be mowed. It has its own charging “house” and mows (quietly!) in the middle of the night and then returns to the house for recharging. The first one will be put into operation in October at Crestline Field.
“These mowers will not only save on gas, emissions and noise, but they will reduce the man hours needed to maintain the field, and those employees will be able to focus on other much needed tasks,” Williams said. “We expect the fields to always look clean cut and be much healthier because of the reduced compaction from our larger mowers. As we learn more about these mowers, we hope to deploy them on some of our other fields.”
All of this activity is part of a bigger picture we are working on to transition into an eco-friendlier community, and it plays well into our Bee City, Tree City and monarch butterfly initiatives. We are in the early stages of forming a city Sustainability Committee to help shepherd and coordinate these various activities.
