“We have had, over the years, some complaints along the lines of these recreational activities,” said Brendan Doyle, noise program supervisor for the DDPHE. “More recently, as some of you are aware, we've had complaints about pickleball.”
Recreational noise can include everything from the sinking of basketballs into chain nets to the pelting of baseballs inside a batting cage. But it's pickleball that has landed at center court, especially at Monday's meeting, where locals questioned why the four courts in Congress Park were shut down in early April.
“My whole purpose is trying to understand what occurred in Denver, learning what might happen in other communities, because pickleball is a growing sport,” said resident Webb Hayne.
The volume of noise complaints related to the loud and raucous game had grown to max levels at Congress Park before the closing of the courts, which are mere feet from homes. Denver Parks & Recreation was planning to move the courts into the park and away from residences before it was determined that even that wouldn’t fix the problem.
“We have rules and regulations in the city that we need to follow and adhere to,” Scott Gilmore, deputy executive director of the Department of Parks & Recreation, told Westword of that decision. “If this pickleball court was run by a private business that wasn't Denver Parks & Rec, they would have been either told to mitigate it and get the noise under control or shut it down.”
The stipulations of the noise ordinance state that noise can reach a maximum of 55 decibels during the day and 50 decibels at night in residential areas. At the April 17 meeting, Justin LaMascus, noise investigator for DDPHE, said that the department had tested sound levels at sixteen different homes in the area, and found that even being a block away from the courts wasn't far enough.
“I was out there five times,” he said. “It's different every day, but for the most part, almost all of them were out of compliance.”
The city's investigation into noise at the courts began after the DDPHE received three formal complaints and an estimated ten informal complaints through Denver City council and the parks department. All noise program investigations are complaint-based.
When pickleball wasn't being played, the noise at the homes around the park was only 37 decibels, LaMascus noted. The DDPHE also tested the proposed court location that would have been farther from residences; above-the-level noise still would have resulted from there.
The uproar following pickleball’s removal at Congress Park was just one of the issues that prompted the department to seek feedback specifically related to recreation before it finalizes a new noise ordinance. Another meeting scheduled for Friday, April 21, from 1 to 2 p.m. on Zoom will be the last public gathering in what has been a fourteen-month process of collecting community feedback about the revision of the ordinance, which was last changed in 2008.
"The current noise ordinance does not speak to recreational activities specifically; therefore, the intent of the meetings this week is to gather input about all types of recreational activities that occur in various settings, not just in parks," said Amber Campbell, DDPHE marketing and communications specialist, adding that although pickleball is the latest hot topic, recreational activities have been a challenge for several years.
“Do you feel like the current protections in the ordinance, as they are now, strike the right balance?” Doyle asked during the April 17 meeting. “Or should we be looking at being more or less protective of people subjected to recreational noise?”
Simon Krauss, who lives directly next to Congress Park and filed one of the official complaints, said the current decibel limit is acceptable, but that the process of documenting and alleviating errors could be refined.
“It’s been a neighborhood concern for years,” Krauss pointed out. “Now I understand that if you've got the loud voices or someone having a lot of parties next door, that's not Denver Health — you call the police. But if it's a systemic, consistent, ongoing, endanger-your-health-because-of-the-noise kind of problem, then you engage with Denver Health.”
Making those delineations clearer could be helpful in the future, Krauss suggested. But other participants aid that the current restrictions paddle recreation too hard.
Basketball games can contribute to recreational noise.
Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash
But Cheryl Alongi, another Denverite who lives next to Congress Park, said pickleball is not the same as any other recreational noise she’s heard in her 23 years of living there.
“It is relentless, and it does not stop,” she said. “It becomes very difficult to function and work from home. I cannot open my windows. I cannot go outside. ... You have to understand, you can go home to the quiet of your home after you're finished playing pickleball. It doesn't stop for us, period.”
In the reworked noise ordinance, it's possible that the kind of persistent noise caused by pickleball could be dealt with differently than noise resulting from one-time events. At this point, said Doyle, all options are on the table.
The department is considering a full exemption for recreational activity and a hybrid model with enforceable time limits on recreational noise. There's also the possibility that noise coming from public areas could be exempted in ways that noise coming from private residences wouldn’t be.
“We haven't come up with a solution yet,” Doyle said. “That's part of the reason we're wanting to hear what people have to say.”
Under current regulations, the DDPHE can’t issue tickets to individual people; all it can do is take measurements and determine if something is legally allowed in the noise ordinance or not. In the case of Congress Park, it simply gave Parks & Recreation information about noise levels. The decision to close the pickleball courts was entirely in the hands of the parks department.
“One of the things that I'm finding is that Denver Parks & Rec always seems to find themselves managing from crisis to crisis,” said Denver recreation advocate David Riordon at the April 17 meeting. “I think there needs to be an ombudsman-type position that speaks to any complaints that the public has and then takes those complaints and sees where they can move those forward.”
Erica Pike works at Wax Trax record store, which was slapped for violating noise levels with an outdoor concert; she said supported Riordon’s idea of a Parks & Recreation ombudsperson, as did other residents. While that suggestion isn’t necessarily related to the noise ordinance revision, Riordon asked the team to consider a policy that ensures that pre-existing skateparks — or even pickleball courts — in areas where residential buildings are later developed be allowed to continue emitting recreational noise at their previous levels.
Paul Riedesel, noise program lead, said the DDPHE is considering several options related to pre-existing noise as the city changes, including grandfathering in those noise levels or allowing them to be marginally higher than typical residential limits.
After the scheduled meeting on April 21, the noise team will work to put together its proposal, which will then be reviewed by the Denver City Attorney’s Office and eventually sent to city council for a final vote. Residents can still submit comments to [email protected], and Doyle encouraged those in attendance to follow the revisions on the Denver Noise Program website.
“We're in the inevitable situation where this ordinance is not going to make everyone happy all of the time,” he acknowledged. “But we're trying to do our best to make it efficient for our team, to make it make sense, and to do the best that we can to provide revisions to the ordinance.”
