Town Council Work Session - Feb 09, 2026

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Leesburg Town Council 2h 33m 3 speakers 5 agenda items transcribed 2 months ago official recording ↗

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Mayor (Burke) 2:15

Let me start tonight's call to order tonight's town council work session of February 9th, 2026. Our first item for discussion tonight is the amendment to the noise ordinance related to amplified outdoor music. I'm supposed to move it, wasn't I? Oh, well.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 2:45

second.

Mayor (Burke) 2:46

Yes, and I forgot.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 2:47

That's okay.

Mayor (Burke) 2:49

So don't blame him, blame me.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 2:52

So I will speak very briefly, just sort of reset the council and the public, sort of how we got here to this point, and then turn things over to Aubrey Furman from our consulting firm, who will give the bulk of the presentation. So as we discussed before, we are trying to we are suggesting moving to a system whereby A permit would be required to have amplified outdoor music. That permit would specify both a decibel level and a location from which the sound would be measured. And this would apply for any commercial establishment that has amplified outdoor music. We believe that this is something that is fairer, clearer, less subjective than the plainly audible standard that's in the current ordinance.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 3:47

You'll recall that this came up back in 2023. We had a public hearing in 2025 in April on what we had originally proposed. At that time, you took no action after the public hearing and directed us to retain a consultant to give you some additional information. So we retained the consulting firm. We got voluntary cooperation from four different venues in allowing us to test amplified outdoor music at each of those four cooperating venues. Here are the other elements that we're proposing. As I mentioned before, a permit would be required For any commercial establishment, the duration of the permit would be for a year. We'd replace the plainly audible standard with a decibel level, and each permit would have a specified location for consistency and ease of both enforcement and pre-testing for compliance by the venue.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 5:03

I've already covered all this. I'm trying to go quickly enough so that I don't eat into too much of the consultant's time. We proposed back in the spring this tiered enforcement and penalty system. so that basically three strikes, you're out, and if you get three violations, there'd be a period of time within which you wouldn't be allowed to have a permit or seek a new permit. But enforcement would still remain complaint-driven with the LPD's usual approach of trying to work with an establishment and seek voluntary compliance before they issued a citation. Our consulting firm that we retained at your direction was Shane Milsom and Wilkie. You see the four venues that agreed to voluntarily test with us.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 6:03

And then in addition, some of you were with us on a very brisk evening when our consultants set up a sound demonstration out here on the town green to try and give you a way to correspond between the decibel levels and distance and volume so you could experience some of that for yourself. So we did that back in December. So Aubrey, if you're ready to come up. We don't have any proposed legislation for you after our presentation. We're really waiting for some guidance from you. And some of you may have seen I shared with you earlier by email the legislation that we had drafted back in April of 2025, just sort of as a refresher. So with that, I'll stop talking and ask Aubrey Furman to come up and Aubrey will give the balance of the presentation.

Chris Spera (Town Attorney) 7:02

Obviously, I'm here for questions.

Aubrey Furman (Acoustic Consultant, Shenmills & Wilkie) 7:11

Thank you, Chris. My name's Aubrey Furman. I'm an acoustic consultant with Shenmills and Wilkie. I worked with my colleague Sebastian Lee on these surveys for the acoustic study for the town of Leesburg. The purpose of these surveys was to take spot measurements of the existing conditions at local businesses and use those measurements as a baseline for amplified outdoor noise recommendations. An important term to note is that we use LAEQ, which is the equivalent continuous sound pressure level to determine the sound level of a space. So LAEQ is the average numerical value applied to a noise pressure level over the span of a given period. So for example, a refrigerator compressor might be 30 decibels, while a hair dryer right next to your face might be closer to 90 decibels.