Photos from old town college park
College Park resident Kathy Bryant works as a high school yearbook photographer — a profession that often finds her on the road to away games as early as 4 a.m.
However, the noise level at her large Victorian home in the Old Town neighborhood, an area densely populated with students, makes it hard for her to sleep well — if at all — before these events, impairing her ability to drive safely, she said.
“My next-door neighbors would stay up partying until 4 or 5 and keep me awake until I had to leave for work,” said Bryant, Old Town Civic Association president. “I was falling asleep at the wheel. It was very dangerous. I shouldn’t have had to do that.”
As classes resume and tailgate season ramps up, the fall season is “the worst time of year as far noise complaints go,” said Bob Ryan, College Park’s public services director.
READ MORE: Despite unmet demand, officials don’t plan to expand tailgate attendance
“It’s like someone throws a switch, and we go from Mayberry [of Andy Griffith Show fame] to New York City,” Ryan said. “It’s that dramatic of a change.”
According to the city’s fiscal 2015 Noise Report, published Sept. 11, the city received 95 calls to its code enforcement hotline last September — almost more than in June, July and August of that year combined.
This September, the city received 27 noise-related calls in the first week, which included the football home opener against Richmond. During the last week of August 2014 — the week of that season’s first home game — the city received 23 noise-related calls.
But the slight increase is not indicative of the difference on-campus tailgates have made, Ryan said, as most of those calls were made outside tailgating hours.
“The [Interfraternity Council] tailgating only impacts game days, and it only impacts the three to four hours before the game, so we continue to have noise complaints comparable to any other time the rest of the week,” Ryan said. “The first month of school is always the worst, because there’s so many new people on-campus.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most calls are made about houses in the Old Town neighborhood, District 3 Councilman Robert Day said.
“Every year we go through this,” Day said. “Our residents deal with it on a yearly basis, so their fuse is very short at this point.”
But despite popular belief, the students involved aren’t always part of Greek life, Day said.
“Everyone wants to blame the fraternities, but we get a lot of complaints that aren’t tied to them in any way, shape or form,” Day said. “Just because it’s students in a house, 9 out of 10 times people want to say it’s a sorority or fraternity, but it’s often not at all.”
Redoubled efforts by the city and university have served to improve the situation, Day said.
Trying to make progress toward a long-term solution, city and university officials have taken actions over the past year such as cracking down on off-campus tailgating, scheduling regular meetings with landlords who rent to students, and even establishing programs to actively educate students on city code.
One such program, “Knock and Talk,” entails a team of police officers, code enforcement officers, landlords and members of the Office of Student Conduct knocking on the doors of 56 houses with a history of noise complaints.
“They go around and hand out information packets to educate residents of the expectations for being a good neighbor and the city code enforcements and so forth,” Ryan said. “Some of the satellite houses and other non-affiliated fraternities and even some team houses have historically been the sites of most noise complaints.”
Bryant said the absence of off-campus tailgating in particular has improved the quality of life for Old Town residents, many of whom are often frustrated by the inability to enjoy their property the way they’d like.
“Residents work during the week, so we sometimes only have Saturday or Sundays to garden or sit out in the yard, but the noise can be so intolerable that you can’t even do that,” Bryant said. “The tailgate levels have greatly improved the noise level during the day. A week ago Saturday I heard no noise at all, zero.”
None of this would have been possible without the involvement of the university, Bryant said.
“Until President [Wallace] Loh got involved, no one cared at the University of Maryland about us — we were like the little stepchildren,” Bryant said. “We [residents] have no clout. We don’t mean anything to students because we can’t do anything.”
Though the city’s next step remains unclear, what’s obvious is that it must match residents’ expectations to students’, said Cole Holocker, student liaison to the city council and a senior government and politics major.
“Reconciling the viewpoints [of students and residents] is extremely challenging,” Holocker said. “If we come from a place of mutual understanding, we can arrive at a better resolution.”
Holocker said many students and some residents feel the city’s noise code, which requires residents to keep noise below 55 decibels after 8 p.m., is unfair for a college town.
Fifty-five decibels is quieter than a dishwasher, clothes dryer or “typical conversation,” according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
“The ‘you need to move out’ or ‘you need to be quiet’ discussion is not productive — that’s not anything that will help this city become a top university town,” Holocker said. “I’m not saying students should be throwing ragers next door to families, but we need to reconcile our expectations of what the noise level will be.”
