Flin Flon city council is poised to outlaw incessant manmade noise at the trailer court before deciding whether to take the ban community wide.
Council last week approved initial reading of a bylaw that makes it a municipal offence to continually create unwanted noise within the mobile-home district.
“It has to do with ongoing complaints we have about noise in the trailer court,” said Coun. Skip Martin, who introduced the motion.
Martin said the law would apply to “persistent noise” regardless of the time of day it is produced.
Complainants would keep a record of the noise for 10 to 14 days and share this document, along with a description of how the noise is affecting them, with council.
Council would then decide whether the bylaw is being violated and decide on the next steps.
Opposition
Coun. Karen MacKinnon was the lone opponent of the new rule, not because she thinks it is a bad idea, but because she wants it to cover the entire community.
“If it was for Flin Flon as a whole, I would vote for it,” she said.
But Coun. Bill Hanson called the bylaw “a good way to test the waters.” If it works well at the trailer court, he said it could perhaps be adopted in the rest of Flin Flon.
Martin wasn’t opposed to focusing on the trailer court, saying the city is the neighbourhood’s landlord and that mobile-home dwellers are more sensitive to noise because their trailers are so close together.
Bernard Dunbar, a trailer court resident, said unwanted noise in his neighbourhood is mainly generated by snowmobiles in the winter and ATVs in the summer.
“They’ll go round and round and round, then they’ll go the opposite way round and round,” he said, referring to quads on the loop formed by the trailer court streets.
Dunbar said he has watched teenagers drive a quad around the loop as many as 20 consecutive times.
Others illegally use their ATVs to travel from their mobile home to a friend or family member’s trailer, said the retiree.
As for snowmobilers, Dunbar said they tend to drive around in circles near the United Steelworkers monument at the trailer court entrance. Others travel between the trailer court and the Victoria Inn property.
Ongoing
Dunbar said the ATV and snowmobile noise has been an ongoing problem in the four years he has lived at the trailer court.
He called council’s tentative bylaw “a good idea” but agreed with MacKinnon that it should be community wide.
“They [ATVs] are just driving all over the place and you never hear of anybody getting caught or doing anything about it,” Dunbar said.
“There’s a lot of people that obey all the laws, but there’s always a few that don’t.”
Mark Kolt, chief administrative officer for the city, said the difference between the trailer court bylaw and the city’s current noise bylaw is that the former targets recurring noise, not individual situations.
Council is expected to approve third and final reading of the trailer court bylaw as early as Sept. 16, at which time it will become law.
Rejection
The bylaw comes less than a year after council initially approved, but subsequently rejected, a bylaw to ban off-road vehicles from idling between, or within 10 feet of, mobile homes.
It would have also prohibited off-road vehicles anywhere in the trailer court from idling for more than 15 minutes in a one-hour time frame.
