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Nicholasville to lower boom on firework displays

February 07, 2012|By Mike Moore | mmoore@jessaminejournal.com

Journal file photo

Last year, the state lowered the boom on communities when it allowed the sale of Class C fireworks that include bottle rockets, roman candles and larger items that shoot exploding fire balls into the air.

As a result, many residents in Nicholasville were in an uproar over the rockets’ red glare at all hours of the night.

But the Nicholasville City Commission is on the cusp of passing an ordinance that would regulate the ordnance of Class C fireworks inside city limits.

“The complaints that I’ve had are not about people shooting the fireworks, but it’s the duration that they go through from start to finish,” commissioner Johnny Collier said at Monday’s workshop. “There’s a lot of people who have neighbors shooting them off at 2 and 3 in the morning and around the 4th of July; they’ll start on June 20 and they’ll quit Aug. 1.”

Because of this, police chief Barry Waldrop is in the process of coming up with an ordinance that would put time limits on setting off fireworks.

“I have an ordinance I’ve written up, and I have a meeting with (fire chief Charles Brumfield)) because it has some stuff that applies to the guys at the fire department,” Waldrop said. “Hopefully at (next) Monday’s meeting, I’ll be passing it out to the board for you to read and to get (city attorney Bill Arvin) a copy to prepare into an ordinance, and the meeting after that will be the first vote.”

Waldrop said many cities throughout the state have adopted such ordinances.

“A lot of them weren’t prepared because they changed the law last year, and you can now sell these big, booming fireworks, and it went crazy last year,” the police chief said. “The 4th of July was a disaster; it was two weeks before the 4th of July and two weeks after the 4th of July, and people were calling right and left to complain, and I do not blame them because it got out of hand.”

Waldrop said Kentucky law leaves it up to individual cities to regulate their own ordinances regarding fireworks.

Commissioner Andy Williams asked if the city could set a time limit on when vendors could start selling fireworks, but Arvin advised the city it could not.

Waldrop said under the proposed ordinance, the public would have set times they could shoot fireworks.

“They’ll be able to shoot off fireworks inside the city under our new ordinance only at certain times of the year like the 4th of July and New Years,” he said. “And they can only shoot them off from 8 p.m. to midnight, and only on certain days. The ordinance will spell all of that out.”

Nicholasville Mayor Russ Meyer said the commission knew it would take a lot of flak last year because of people setting off fireworks during all hours of the night.

“We knew that it was going to be an issue at the 4th of July, and we didn’t have time to get an ordinance in place, and we wanted to see what would happen, and we wanted to check other ordinances and make sure we got it right,” Meyer said.

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