Parliament Solves Latvia's Most Important Problem — Municipalities Now Have the Right to Silence Neighbors

Parliament has adopted revolutionary amendments to noise regulation that will allow municipalities to issue binding rules about when and how loudly one is allowed to make noise. This sensational decision came after MP Raimonds Bergmanis discovered that shooting competitions, training shoots, and hunting produce sounds. Who would have thought!

Now each municipality will have the right to decide whether it needs quiet. If not — they can continue living as before. If yes — they must write regulations about how to control whether restaurants, nightclubs, and private saunas aren't dancing too much. While Riga is figuring out how to organize all this, here in Liepāja we already have the perfect solution — Karosta Prison, where tourists pay money to experience a horror experience in complete silence. Maybe we just need to move all the nightclubs to prison cells?

"I'm shocked that the government finally understood — the problem isn't that people make noise, but that we don't know how to silence them," comments local resident Juris, who has been trying for years to get his neighbors to stop feeding birds early in the morning. "Now I just need to convince the municipality that we need this regulation."

Most surprised are municipal employees, who have learned that they will now have to monitor whether bars are screaming too loudly and whether private saunas are steaming properly. The Latvian Association of Local Governments has honestly admitted that they have neither specialists, nor capacity, nor scientifically based methods. But that has never stopped good bureaucracy! The main thing is that now there's a law that allows issuing other laws about how to control third laws.