It's fall, and that means it's the season of beautiful crimson leaves spiraling downward from trees all poetic-like, then the season of a zillion pounds of grody brown leaf mush covering every sidewalk, and somewhere in between, the season of waking up at 7 in the morning to the sound of somebody riding a lawn mower through the middle of your brain—or at least, that's what a 7 a.m. leaf blower right outside your window sounds like.

Now the city appears to be getting involved in this epic urban battle: Capitol Hill Seattle wrote last week of a little-noticed line item in the city's budget asking the Department of Planning and Development to "provide recommendations describing options for regulations and incentives to reduce or eliminate leaf blower noise and emissions in Seattle."

This morning, council president Sally Clark asked on her Facebook page:

Ok, leafblowers. Subject has risen again. Ban them? Regulate hours of use? Spend time on this at all?

Everyone, of course, has an opinion—comments range from "they are indispensable" to "not only ban them, put a bounty on them" to "the city has bigger fish to fry." Dan weighed in years ago—he's con, at least in Cal Anderson. Erica C. Barnett at PubliCola weighed in last week, also con, calling them "filthy" and "noisy as hell." Sightline, meanwhile, isn't exactly pro, but they happily myth-bust the claim that leaf blowers have anything to do with climate change.

What's a city council president to do? Well, as we all know, there's "democracy," whatever the hell that means, and then there's a good old-fashioned legally binding Slog poll. So, to the polls!