Noise ordinance just a "damn piece of paper" now, huh?

Communities are so eager to ticket someone for a car radio that's audible for 3 seconds, but construction noise that lasts 24/7 for months gets a free pass. "Quality of life" ordinances seem to be designed to be enforced selectively, and that's why I've long found them suspect.

Here in the Belv, numerous traffic signs warn against motorists having music too loud, but nothing was ever done about a pile driver that clanked almost around the clock for months in the winter of 2005-06 and kept residents awake over a radius of a mile.

Now folks in Cincinnati and the neighboring town of Madeira are being treated to a nauseating repeat...repeat...repeat...repeat...repeat.

For 5 months now, construction noise for a ritzy retirement village has kept Cincinnatians awake - with no respite in sight. The din has begun as early as 4:30 AM and lasted as late as midnight. It happens on weekends and weekdays alike.

Cincinnati passed a rigid noise ordinance in the late '90s to bar noise that causes "inconvenience or annoyance to persons of ordinary sensibilities." The intent of this law, however, was to provide a rationale to harass gatherings of people. Most folks of "ordinary sensibilities" (other than the ol' Osk) would find 5 months of gratuitous construction noise to be "inconvenience or annoyance", yet the law isn't enforced against that.

The city does have rules that are supposed to limit construction noise to a lenient window of 7 AM to 11 PM. But the city waived even these lax rules for this and other projects!

I guess laws really are just "damn pieces of paper" (as Bush would say). But if you play music too loud for a few minutes, you'll see that the only piece of paper you'll get is a citation to court.

The construction noise is continuing despite complaints by dozens of nearby residents.

Big Business seems to derive joy out of disturbing neighborhoods with needless noise. Next time you hear some disrupting of the peace like this, odds are the construction trucks have out-of-county plates or an out-of-area phone number. So some of these contractors don't give a shit about the community. And when they're done in your neighborhood, they'll move on to another and leave yours a wreck.

(Source: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20081112/NEWS01/811120359/1168/NEWS)