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Think Portland isn’t business friendly? Start selling electric leaf blowers.
That’s what Kevin Cardoza is doing. He’s the battery-and-robotics-automation strategist at Stark Street Lawn & Garden, and he’s running a battery blower super sale and demo event on Dec. 16, at the company’s store on Southeast Stark Street.
Cardoza’s timing is no accident. Starting Jan. 1, use of gas-powered leaf blowers will be prohibited, except from October through December, when leaves are plentiful, and wet. That’s the policy until Jan. 1, 2028, when gas machines will be banned year-round.
Why the delay? When the ban was passed in March 2024, policymakers didn’t think electric blowers were powerful enough to deal with Portland’s fall leaf load, especially during rainy years. Now, Cardoza says, they are up to the task.
Larger landscaping companies have made the switch to electric, but “a lot of the little guys are concerned about the cost of the initial investment,” Cardoza says.
A Kress KC510.9, one of Stark Street’s products, is listed $329.99 on the Kress website. Cardoza is busily promoting the KC510.9, shooting a video during this week’s atmospheric river showing the machine blowing wet leaves away like goose feathers in a tornado.
Cardoza, 33, is nothing if not determined. Rather than whine about Portland’s business climate and flee across the river to Vancouver, Cardoza and Stark Street Lawn & Garden are sticking by their Portland location, one of seven outlets they have in Oregon.
Close observers of the news may rememer Cardoza. In 2013, he crashed his motorcycle into a retaining wall and lost the use of his left arm. A year later, he had it amputated. He rock climbs in spite of his injury and was featured in a 2019 story by KGW-TV about PDX Adaptive Climbing, a club for people with injuries that make climbing tougher than it already is.
Cardoza credits Judy Walton for his business opportunity. Walton is the head of Quiet Clean PDX, the local chapter of a national organization that seeks to ban gas leaf blowers because of noise, noxious emissions, and “hurricane-force winds” that disrupt soils.
Noise is what drives most people mad about gas leaf blowers. Cardoza understands.
“They’re nails on a chalkboard for me,” he says.
