What respect do we owe our neighbors? A growing Horry County debates altering noise law
When you’re at home or on your property, what rights do you have to make noise? And what respect do you owe your neighbors?
Those are questions at the heart of a debate the Horry County Council is having over a change to the county’s noise ordinance, and ones that sparked an in-depth debate at the council’s Tuesday night meeting.
County Council member Gary Loftus, who represents part of Myrtle Beach, put forward an update to the noise ordinance in mid-August aimed at developers: Construction, via the ordinance, would not be allowed in the early mornings or late at night, specifically before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. Loftus said that he and his constituents have been bothered by home builders constructing new houses early in the morning and kicking up dust and noise late in the evening.
But on Tuesday, a debate on the ordinance dove into deeper questions: Would the updated law apply to individuals working in their yards or garages in the evening, or remodeling their homes ? In those cases, several council members argued, it’s not commercial developers running heavy equipment and making noise, it’s individuals working on vehicles or doing home construction.
“You pass this, I’m going to be violating this law because a lot of times I’m in my shop at night after hours,” said council member Al Allen, who represents a large portion of the largely rural Western part of Horry County.
As it stands now, the ordinance Loftus is pushing would limit construction noise from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Currently, the noise ordinance allows for construction noise from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day of the week. Loftus, along with council member Dennis DiSabato, who represents parts of Myrtle Beach and Carolina Forest, said they’d both received calls from constituents asking if they could do something to limit developers from building early in the mornings or late at night.
On Tuesday, though, Loris resident Chris Stevens asked council members if they could amend the ordinance to make an exception for individuals. Stevens is remodeling his home, room by room, and also works a nine-to-five job. There are some weeknights he wants to work on flooring or other construction in his home but can’t get started until 6 or 7 at night, he said.
“As somebody that’s doing some construction work myself, somebody that works a nine-to-five job, I ask that council consider an amendment for individuals working on their own homes that may work a nine-to-five job, who may get home at 6 o’clock p.m. to allow them some time to do their own construction,” Stevens said.
Allen motioned to add the exception to the ordinance shortly afterward. That sparked an in-depth debate.
County attorney Arrigo Carotti explained to council members that exempting individuals from the ordinance would apply to homeowners, not developers building individual homes. But that caused DiSabato to raise another point: What if a person was remodeling their home, and hired someone, a subcontractor, to help? Would that then violate the ordinance?
Carotti explained that enforcement of the ordinance would be “complaint driven” meaning the change would simply allow residents who are living near a noisy project to call the county and have someone come to enforce the law. But that explanation then raised another question: How is being a good neighbor defined in Horry County? As Loftus argued, the ordinance wouldn’t affect people working on their homes if they’re on good terms with their neighbors. Carotti noted that not everyone gets along with those who live nearby.
“But there may be a neighbor that just doesn’t like his neighbor even doing work on his own home at those hours,” he said.
DiSabato added: “If I’m sitting in my house at 9 o’clock and my 3-year-old is trying to go sleep and my neighbors start to hammer nails at 9 o’clock in the evening keeping my kid up, I ain’t going to be happy.”
Loftus said he worried that adding exemptions to the ordinance would ultimately water it down so much that it wouldn’t have much impact on the problem he was seeking to fix.
The debate ultimately boiled down to this: Would restricting noisy projects in the early morning or evening hours infringe upon the rights of the people who want to do that work, or would it infringe on the rights of the neighbors who might not want to listen to the noise?
Council members did not come up with a clear answer to the questions, but Allen said the fact the questions were being raised was evidence of how drastically Horry County has changed in recent decades.
“You know, 25 years ago, this would have been a moot issue,” he said. “But I think we’re treading on some dangerous ground where we’re including individual homeowners and individual property rights.”
In some ways, Allen was right: Horry County has added more than 200,000 new residents — who live in tens of thousands of new homes — since 1990. But other council members countered by saying that even if individuals weren’t exempted from the ordinance, they wouldn’t be affected if they got along with their neighbors.
“What happened to walking next door and saying, ‘Hey bud, let’s have a beer and stop hammering at 2 o’clock in the morning’?” said council member Johnny Vaught, who’s district in Carolina Forest includes both dense neighborhoods and more rural areas. “We’re going crazy.”
Allen, though, argued that not exempting individuals would tread on their rights as homeowners.
“I have no problem saying somebody doing commercial work needs to stop at a decent time,” he said. “But to tell a homeowner he or she that may work odd hours and stuff cannot come home and paint a room and stuff or do something to their own property, that’s just too much government overreach guys, c’mon.”
Stevens, for his part, said he favored an approach that would tailor the ordinance depending on how close a person’s neighbors were. If they lived in a dense subdivision, the stricter hours should apply. But for someone like him, whose closest neighbor is a quarter of a mile away, the regulations should be looser.
He said he thinks Horry County residents should show respect to their neighbors and the lives they lead, but also maintain their own individual rights from the county.
“I think I owe the same respect to my neighbors that I would if they were 15 feet away or on the other side of a wall if we were in an apartment building … our neighbors have to sleep they have to go to work,” he said. “But at the same time, we have a right where we should be allowed to maintain our properties and we shouldn’t be force to hire someone just because we work.”
He said he gets along well with his neighbors but favors looser restrictions for less-dense areas because more regulations could lead to issues in the future.
“We could have a little disagreement over something minor that leads to a noise complaint,” he said.
By the end of the debate, council members voted to send the ordinance back to a council committee for further debate and amendments. The legislation will go before Allen’s infrastructure and regulation committee next week. Loftus sounded a weary tone.
“You can work all weekend long ... (you) just can’t do it after 7 o’clock at night,” he said. “It’s not like we’re rewriting the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, we’re just modifying the hours.”
