A sound of summer has been silenced.

After four years in Kingston, John Boukas has been told to silence the music coming from his ice cream truck.

On Wednesday afternoon, Boukas ran afoul of the city’s bylaw department, which warned him that the music he plays while driving though residential neighbourhoods violates the noise bylaw.

The order to turn off the music could compel Boukas to find another city to sell his popsicles, slushes and rocket pops.

“I’m not going to argue with them or stay so they can give me tickets, so I might as well go somewhere else,” Boukas said Thursday afternoon.

“They don’t want me to play the music. Without the music, how will people know I am there?” he said. “Ice cream trucks, it’s a package, it comes with the music.”

Boukas said he enjoys working in Kingston, but he said if he can’t play music, he will likely leave the city at the end of the month.

“In the ice cream business, you need the music,” he said.

“Without the music, there is no business. The people are inside, they stay inside, they don’t come out. The little kids, when it’s hot, they stay inside.”

The warning was issued while Boukas was on Pearl Road in Cataraqui Woods.

Boukas said the warning followed an incident Wednesday morning when he was at City Hall to pick up a licence. He said he accidently parked in a handicap parking space and was confronted by a bylaw officer about it.

A photo posted to Facebook shows Boukas’ truck parked on Pearl Road as the bylaw officer issues the warning. There were about a dozen comments, all of them upset by what they saw.

The ice cream truck was a common site in the subdivision during the summer, as were children poised on their front steps, money in hand, awaiting its arrival.

The bylaw department issued the warning in response to complaints from residents.

“I’ve heard a couple of complaints,” said Kim Leonard, manager of licensing and enforcement for the City of Kingston. “Everyone has a different tolerance. It just depends. Some people put their children to bed early or they are trying to sleep.

“We have all different kinds of complaints about noise for all different reasons,” Leonard said.

“It’s a personal thing.”

Boukas said he always drives the same route and usually ends his work day before 8 p.m. He said he has turned off the music in areas where residents have asked.

Kingston’s noise bylaw prohibits the use of “any outdoor auditory signaling device, including but not limited to outdoor paging systems, the ringing of bells or gongs, the use of sirens, whistles or chimes, or the production, reproduction or amplification of any similar sounds by electronic means.”

Boukas said he plans to read the bylaw before deciding what to do next.

“I’ve worked in this business a long time and the most beautiful people are in the Kingston area,” he said. “I tell people that.”

elliot.ferguson@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/Elliotatthewhig