Privately owned drones increasingly populate the sky above Orange County, but few local cities have laws in place that regulate them, creating the potential for major accidents.
That’s according to a recent Orange County grand jury report, which calls for the county and each of its cities to adopt ordinances by next spring governing local drone use and punishing violators with up to a $1,000 fine or six months in jail.
Those measures, proposed to emulate a recent Los Angeles law giving the city teeth in enforcing rules that closely mirror federal regulations, would make it a misdemeanor to fly privately owned drones within 25 feet of another person, more than 500 feet above the ground or within five miles of an airport without permission.
While there have been no reported major drone accidents in Orange County, the grand jury report notes that local cities received nearly 100 drone-related complaints during a recent unspecified one-year period.
Those incidents included drones buzzing outside the bedroom windows of homes, unmanned aircraft filming sunbathers on beaches, a GoPro camera falling from a drone and landing near a group of people in an unidentified beach city, and the Huntington Beach Police Department’s helicopter unit reporting several “near misses” in colliding with drones.
Federal law restricts some of those maneuvers, but the Federal Aviation Administration has issued few penalties for drone flights, causing some cities, such as Los Angeles, to create their own enforcement mechanisms.
“Recreational drone owners are largely self-policed, which leads to a wide range of behavior,” reads the grand jury report, released last week.
“It is short-sighted for our county and cities to ignore this emerging concern.”
Grand jury recommendations are not binding, but the county and its cities must respond within 90 days of the report’s release, indicating whether they agree with the proposed changes.
The report found that almost all cities in the county reported having no plans to regulate drone use, either because officials saw it as a “non issue” or because they were awaiting further state or federal legislation to solve problems of unsafe flying.
Huntington Beach and Dana Point are two cities mentioned in the report as having laws related to remote-control aircraft flight, but those ordinances seem to forbid drone use only in certain areas and don’t have rules about their use in most parts of town.
Federal laws prohibit recreational drones from flying above 400 feet, out of sight of the operator, recklessly, near people or stadiums, or within five miles of airports.
But the FAA has fined hobbyist operators only a couple of dozen times, choosing instead to “educate” offenders, according to an FAA official.
The agency has never fined a drone operator in California, according to data from a recent investigation by the publication Motherboard.
With twice as many drones sold in 2015 than in any year prior – 1.1 million, according to the Consumer Technology Association – more cities nationally are considering ways to regulate the hobbyist aircraft.
In past years, municipalities have used existing public safety laws when attempting to prosecute drone hobbyists for dangerous flight maneuvers.
In October, with the intent to create a local enforcement option for federal laws, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance making certain drone flights misdemeanor crimes – a law the grand jury wants Orange County and its cities to emulate.
Troy Rule, an associate professor of law at Arizona State University and expert in airspace regulations, said he thinks local governments are in the best position to create laws governing drone use.
“Local authorities have access to the best local information,” Rule said. “And without local laws, very little enforcement is happening.”
Congress is considering a bill that would make the FAA the sole regulator of unmanned aircraft, superseding local laws such as the one Los Angeles has passed, in an effort to prevent municipalities from creating a patchwork of airspace ordinances.
Rule said he sees the bill as an attempt to simplify regulations for the drone delivery services Amazon and Google may have planned.
But, he said, they would affect the ability of local governments to restrict hobbyists drone flights, as well.
In October, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed three bills that would have prohibited drone hobbyists from flying above wildfires, K-12 schools and jails, and would have implemented up to $5,000 fines and six months in jail for those violations. Brown said those actions were already illegal under other state laws.
Patrick Smith, owner of Costa Mesa’s Aerial Media Pros, a retailer and manufacturer of professional and hobbyist drones, said he agrees there needs to be laws restricting drone flight.
But he worries that the ordinances proposed by the grand jury report would be too restrictive, particularly the 25-foot buffer from people.
“There’s always going to be people around,” Smith said.
“It sounds like I could be flying anywhere at any time and violate their laws, which I don’t think is right, because we’ve been flying remote-control planes for near 30 years and we’ve never had issues.”
June 3, 2016
Orange County Register
By Jordan Graham
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