PORT ANGELES — One proponent of a personal fireworks ban within Port Angeles city limits brought shrapnel to a hearing this week.
Pro-ban speaker Robert Nevaril said he found the metal next to his front door after someone blew up his lamp post with a sparkler bomb during a spate of Fourth of July fireworks.
He passed it around at a packed Port Angeles City Council hearing Tuesday night on a proposed city law banning the sale and discharge of consumer fireworks beginning in 2016.
The idea was greeted with passion by both those for and against the proposal.
Fourteen speakers favored the prohibition within the city limits and 10 were opposed during the two-hour hearing. Together, they comprised about one-quarter of all those who attended the meeting.
Mayor Dan Di Guilio commented Wednesday that he was especially impressed by the metal Nevaril brought.
“It’s kind of scary when those kinds of things happen in our community,” Di Guilio said.
“I wouldn’t want to see a repeat of that. I do have some concerns.”
The hearing will be continued to the next council meeting at 6 p.m. March 3 at City Hall, 321 E. Fifth St.
City Councilwoman Cherie Kidd said Wednesday that the council is expected to make a decision on the new law March 3 after the hearing.
“We have a burn ban in place July 1, then we have a free-for-all July 4, so we really have to look at health and safety issues,” Kidd said.
Speakers who favored the ban, which was proposed by the Port Angeles group Safer 4th of July, spoke of neighborhood “war zones” they said were created by rampant Fourth of July fireworks.
They said pets are traumatized by explosions, veterans are forced to relive the wars they fought and spoke of fire dangers and noise that characterize their lives every July 3-5.
“My neighborhood has indeed become a war zone,” Pat Flood said, adding that she leaves her home during the holiday to protect her pets, a departure that in turn leaves her home at risk.
But speakers against the ordinance argued that a ban would be ineffective.
Native American reservations where fireworks are sold are unfettered by city ordinances that would otherwise make them illegal.
And nonprofit clubs earn money for worthy causes, such as scholarships, by selling fireworks, said Malinda Anjovine, a Port Angeles native.
“We are helping the future of our area by enabling children to go to college that may not have been able to,” she said.
They said the problem was enforcement of existing restrictions that allow legal consumer fireworks within city limits only from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. on the Fourth of July.
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.
The volume of calls about the illegal discharge of fireworks within city limits makes the present law difficult to enforce, police and fire officials have said.
Speakers in favor of fireworks framed their arguments, too, in terms of their rights and liberties as Americans.
Setting off fireworks is a matter of exercising free speech and expression, Robert Briggs said.
“I don’t believe we should give up our rights to groups and their smaller definitions of patriotism,” he said.
“There has to be alternatives so a majority of people in town can be satisfied.”
But Young Johnson took issue with the rights argument.
Rights include freedom to practice religion and get an education, Johnson said.
“It’s not a right to light fireworks and throw litter onto other people’s property,” she said.
“I don’t think we can keep using our rights as an excuse to keep being invasive and invading other people’s lives.
“It’s not a right to scare people in their homes.
“What it is, is a pleasure.”
Some ban opponents were criticized for having ties to the fireworks industry and a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
“You have a quiet majority in this town who are fed up with fireworks use,” one man said.
But Karen Gower, who said she does public relations for TNT Fireworks in Tacoma, cited statistics showing that bans are ineffective in stopping fireworks fires.
A ban will not work with nearby reservations selling fireworks and might in fact create a likelihood of more-explosive fireworks replacing those that are banned.
The troubles that exist under the current Port Angeles law “sounds like an enforcement problem,” she added.
Port Angeles would be the second city on the North Olympic Peninsula to ban consumer fireworks, which have been prohibited in Port Townsend since 2003.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.