A months-long debate over noise enforcement in Elon has come to a timely pause – if not an actual conclusion – with the approval of a new municipal noise ordinance earlier this week.
Elon’s town council ultimately voted 5-to-0 for these new regulations on Monday, allowing the town’s police officers to issue civil citations in addition to the criminal charges that have historically been their primary weapons against noise violations.
Under the new rules, excessive noise will still constitute a Class III misdemeanor under state law – with a potential criminal fine of $50 for those who are convicted. Police officers will nevertheless have the discretion to issue civil fines ranging from $100 for the first violation to $300 for the third and any subsequent offense.
The council approved the new ordinance despite a modicum of reluctance from some of its members so that the proposed civil penalties would be on the books before classes at Elon University officially kicked off on Tuesday. The town’s leaders had sought this correlation with the university’s schedule in order to allow the town’s police department to introduce the new rules to students before they got too deep into the fall semester.
“The semester is starting, and I want to make sure the police department has the ability to enforce the ordinance fairly,” Elon’s mayor pro tem Monti Allison declared before Monday’s unanimous vote. “This is recommended by our police chief, and it has been reviewed by our attorney.
The ordinance’s impact on students had been a priority for the town’s elected leaders ever since one campus fraternity approached the council last fall to complain that rival organizations were using noise complaints to pursue petty grudges against them. The fraternity’s members were particularly aghast that these calls to the police could lead to misdemeanor criminal charges, which prompted the council to have the town’s police department explore other ways to address noise violations.
In response to the council’s instructions, Elon’s police chief Kelly Blackwelder drafted a nine-page proposal based on noise regulations in other college towns across North Carolina. These prospective rules, which were unveiled to the council last month, included decibel levels and other particulars that Blackwelder acknowledged would require further debate and review. She was more confident, however, about a proposed set of civil fines that she said could be easily slipped into the town’s existing rules.
Blackwelder went on to insist that criminal sanctions remain part of the town’s noise ordinance lest their removal deprive the police of their authority to deal with excessive noise. Yet, she agreed to draw up an ordinance that combined civil penalties with criminal sanctions to provide her department with a more versatile toolkit for addressing noise violations.
Blackwelder was on vacation when her proposed regulations came before the council on Monday, and the police chief’s absence raised some misgivings for councilmember Stephanie Bourland about a potentially hasty decision on the part of the council.
Elon’s town manager Richard Roedner nevertheless assured the councilmember that the police chief was in full support of the proposal up for review. Meanwhile, the rest of the council persuaded Bourland that it would be better to adopt an ordinance that allows both civil fines and criminal sanctions rather than leave the police with misdemeanor charges as their only option for handling excessive noise.
Bourland eventually gave in to these arguments despite some lingering reluctance to act without the police chief on hand.
“I wanted to keep it as clean as possible and have all the players involved,” she told the rest of the council before Monday’s 5-to-0 decision. “But if we delay it, it keeps the criminal penalties on the books, and that’s the exact opposite of what I intended.”
