There was plenty of sound, if not all that much fury, in Elon last week as the town’s municipal police chief unveiled the initial results of a months-long overhaul of the town’s noise ordinance.
Yet, after roughly an hour of debate, it remains to be seen what, if anything, this rewrite will signify as Elon’s elected leaders continue to seek a happy medium between their desire to keep the peace and their commitment to the tolerant outlook of a small college town.
In the end, the members of Elon’s town council took no formal action on the proposed ordinance that police chief Kelly Blackwelder presented to them during a special-called meeting last Tuesday.
As a short-term measure, the council instructed Blackwelder to rough out some proposed civil penalties to supplant the town’s existing criminal sanctions for noise violations. But its members found themselves hard-pressed to move forward on the other potential changes that the police chief had proposed to the town’s current restrictions on excessive noise.
The council’s general inclination to inertia was all well and good to Blackwelder, who acknowledged that her revision of the town’s noise ordinance was still very much a work in progress.
“To say that this is a rough draft is an understatement,” she told the council last Tuesday. “We’re going from a one-page noise ordinance to adding nine pages…and it think it would really behoove us to slow down and get this right the first time.”
Elon’s town council had originally assigned Blackwelder to revise the town’s noise ordinance after members of one campus fraternity had approached the town’s leaders in November with some objections to the existing restrictions.
This delegation from Elon’s chapter of Beta Theta Pi had complained that rival organizations at the town’s eponymous university had more or less weaponized the current ordinance, leaving them inundated with frivolous noise violations. The fraternity’s representatives also faulted the ordinance’s exclusive reliance on criminal sanctions, given the potential black mark that a misdemeanor charge can leave on the record of a well-meaning college student.
Blackwelder told the council that, in response to these protests, she has examined noise ordinances in other collegiate communities, ranging from Chapel Hill to Greenville. The town’s police chief said that she has also conferred with her counterparts in some of these towns to see what measures they find most effective for dealing with excessive noise.
Based on this research, Blackwelder has drawn up a number of potential provisions for Elon’s new noise ordinance. These measures included some quantifiable standards for excessive noise based on decibel readings – and not just an officer’s personal judgment. Blackwelder also proposed some civil fines as an adjunct to the existing criminal penalties, which she was nevertheless loath to abandon since she said they’re the basis for the police department wherewithal to address noise complaints.
Blackwelder went on to concede that her proposed ordinance hadn’t been properly vetted by the town’s attorney prior to its debut to the council last Tuesday. She also predicted that many of the particulars will require some nips and tucks; she admitted, for instance, that her proposed decibel levels may be a bit low and serve mainly as place holders rather than solid suggestions that she would like to see the council adopt.
Aside from these disclaimers about her proposed revision, Blackwelder also shared some other considerations that she said have given her pause during her work on the ordinance. She argued, for instance, that a thorough review of her department’s own records dispels the suggestion that the town’s police force has been overly hard on noise violators. As a case in point, she noted that, in 2023, her officers investigated 128 noise-related complaints but issued just 18 citations.
“And if we’re citing 18 out of 128,” Blackwelder went on to add, “you might ask yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze.”
In the event that the council decides to pulverize this figurative orange, Elon’s attorney Bob Hagemann cautioned its members that they could be in for a long, arduous slog before they have a viable new noise ordinance on the books. Hagemann, who had previously served as the legal counsel for the city of Charlotte, recalled his experiences with a similar overhaul before he retired from the Queen City’s employ.
“In the city of Charlotte, it was a year long process,” he warned. “So, when you open this up, it is a can of worms.”
These potential complexities didn’t seem to discourage Elon’s town council from wading deep into the rip current of noise regulation. During the course of last Tuesday meeting, the council’s members evaluated Blackwelder’s proposals from just about every angle. They also bandied around ideas like attention-grabbing civil fines as high as $300 and criminal sanctions for people who blow off these charges.
Yet, after the better part of an hour, the proposed introduction of civil penalties was the only new measure that the council seemed apt to pursue. To this end, Elon’s mayor Emily Sharpe, instructed Elon’s town manager Richard Roedner to draw up a schedule to civil fines that the council could consider integrating into the existing noise ordinance.
“I think that, in the short term, having a civil option can be very beneficial,” she added. “Right now, it’s subjective with a misdemeanor charge as your only option.”
Meanwhile, Blackwelder acknowledged that there will be much more for the council to consider before the final word is uttered on noise violations in Elon.
“There’s a lot of work ahead of us,” she said. “Probably the most important thing will be educating the public. Everything we do is compliance based. So, we don’t want to write tickets, and we don’t want to take people to jail.”
