By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006; B05
In the 16 months since Fairfax County silenced St. John Neumann's bells for exceeding noise limits, parishioners and staffers have tried to find a way to remain good neighbors and still keep their traditional call to prayer.
"It hurts, because the bells are part of our faith," said the Rev. Thomas Murphy, the church's pastor.
Sentiments along Pegasus Lane, a winding, dead-end street bordering the Reston church grounds, run roughly along the lines of: good riddance.
The bells "were much, much too loud," said Judy Forst, who has lived on the street since 1968.
Church bells, which have marked everything from weddings to the ends of wars, are joining car alarms, jackhammers and loud parties as noxious noises that threaten quality of life. Concerns about bells have recently triggered community debates in North Carolina, Florida and Upstate New York. A Massachusetts engineering firm's Web site promotes a system of acoustic screens it developed to redirect chime sounds away from residential areas.
Bells caused Mount Olivet United Methodist Church to run afoul of some North Arlington neighborhoods in 2004. Although it was already within legal limits, the church lowered the volume of its digital chimes three times. Now, one Mount Olivet volunteer said, the bells are so faint "you can't even hear them inside the church."
Since St. John Neumann was ordered to stop using the bells in December 2004, the church has been trapped in the county's regulatory cul-de-sac. To ring them again, it must have either an exemption from Fairfax's noise ordinance or a change in the law that puts it in compliance.
The matter sits with a Board of Supervisors committee that considers proposed changes to zoning laws, but it will be at least a year before the panel makes a decision. Last month, the Development Process Review Committee decided that about two dozen other cases take higher priority, including the placement of adult video stores.
Supervisor Michael R. Frey (R-Sully), the committee chairman, said he had hoped the various stakeholders could have reached a solution.
"It seems kind of sad that we have to do this," he said. "It's a minor problem that you think could be worked out."
The $50,000 electronic bell system was part of a sprawling, $12 million expansion that St. John Neumann completed in April 2004, doubling its capacity from 500 to 1,000. The project was unpopular because it enlarged the church parking lot and destroyed part of the woods that buffered the homes on Pegasus Lane.
The bells were a first for St. John Neumann -- the old chapel didn't have any. When they started ringing in three-minute bursts -- three times weekdays, once Saturdays and before each of five Sunday Masses, beginning at 7:30 a.m. -- neighbors complained. County inspectors found that the bells broke the county noise limit of 55 decibels by a wide margin, registering about 75, roughly equivalent to the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
Fae Wallace, a Pegasus Lane resident who once lived in a small German town near the Luxembourg border, said church bells were part of community life. "But they didn't rock you out of bed," as did those of St. John Neumann, she said.
Reducing the voltage to the three bells, the church brought the reading down to 60 decibels, about the level of normal conversation.
"That's not too loud," said Fairfax zoning administrator Bill Shoup, but it's still above the legal limit. Murphy said the volume of the system the church bought cannot go lower. Some county officials find that difficult to believe.
"Some of us still think, 'It's a computer -- why doesn't it work at a lower decibel?' " he said.
Church officials said the complaints about the bells are really just neighborhood payback for the expansion.
Sean Walsh, a retiree who has lived on Pegasus Lane for 20 years, said that is nonsense. He and some other residents also said that the issue was never bells-or-no-bells. It was those bells, and the clanking, unmelodic sound they produced. One neighbor said they reminded her of cowbells.
"Bells can be very soothing, when properly done. These didn't have any melody," said Walsh, a Brooklyn native who grew up across the street from a church with bells that rang every 15 minutes.
Murphy said the quality of the sound is a matter of opinion. Jim Verdin, whose family-owned Cincinnati company manufactured the bronze bells, also said the criticism doesn't ring true.
"The cowbell thing can't be true," Verdin said. He offered to send a technician to see whether he could help bring the bells within the legal limits.
It's not clear whether other Fairfax churches are exceeding the noise ordinance. Shoup said he could not recall other complaints.
It's also a matter of what else there is to complain about. Carmela Veneroso, president of the National Cathedral Neighborhood Association in Northwest Washington, said she has never heard a complaint about the cathedral's bells, which can reach 81 decibels on the grounds and up to 60 decibels nearby.
"That's the least of our problems," said Veneroso, who cited traffic from off-hour activity at the cathedral's three schools as the neighborhood's main issue.
Shoup, who will retire in June after 29 years in the middle of Fairfax's zoning wars, remembers church bells fondly from his small-town childhood. Now, he said, there is a heightened sensitivity to just about any potential disruption.
"People value their property and their ability to use their property," he said. "It's such a rat race everywhere else that when they come home, they want to be able to enjoy their property.
"Times have changed."
