A Carthage City Council committee advanced a proposal to stiffen the city's nuisance ordinances, making it possible for the city to penalize businesses or individuals that produce foul odors instead of waiting on the state to act.
The council's Public Works Committee voted unanimously to send an amended nuisance ordinance, which includes updated odor enforcement language, which allows city officials to cite the producers of foul odors.
The new ordinance will be considered on first reading at the council's next regular meeting at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13 at Carthage City Hall.
The new nuisance regulations set up three criteria for determining what is an offensive odor and when it should be cited by the city.
"The offensive odors defined, those three criteria are what Nate and I discussed and just kind of put in there for discussion purposes," Short said. "It gets to the point of whether we're going to use equipment to do all of that or if it will be based on a complaint system. The way this is set up it's both."
The three criteria for an offensive odor are:
• When 25 percent or more of a sample of 10 or more people, or 75 percent of a sample of fewer than 10 people exposed to the odor believe it is objectionable.
• When the odor can be detected in a diluted solution of five parts clean air to one part odorous air in two separate trials not less than 15 minutes apart within one hour according to a Scentometer made by the Barnebey and Sutcliff Corp. or another similar technique that will give equivalent results.
• As determined by a code official.
"The proposal is if they're convicted, not less than $500 per day for every violation," Short said. "Plus the city would have the option of getting injunctive relief to get them shut down. (The ordinance) talks about the city having the ability to enter the plant to enforce the regulations on the books. It's fairly straight forward."
Committee members also discussed spending $2,500 to buy a more modern "Nasal Ranger," a machine that can calculate and record the presence of odors more accurately and scientifically than the Scentometer mentioned in the ordinance.
The Scentometer is a wooden box with filters that a person uses to mix air samples to see how severe an odor is.
According to the Web site www.nasalranger.com, "The Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometer is the 'state-of-the-art' in field olfactometry for confidently measuring and quantifying odor strength in the ambient air. The Nasal Ranger Field Olfactometer, a portable odor detecting and measuring device, determines ambient odor 'Dilution-to-Threshold' (D/T) values objectively."
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources currently uses a seven-to-one ratio of odorous air to clean air as a standard for a violation.
For weeks, Mayor Jim Woestman has attended meetings of a DNR committee trying to get them to reduce the ratio needed to trigger a violation to four to one, without success.
Woestman said the DNR has told him that under a ratio of four to one, almost any odor would trigger a violation.
The new ordinance calls for a ratio of five to one.
"We definitely don't want it to tight," Woestman said. "Apparently 4-1 is too tight and 7-1 is too loose so either five or six I think we ought to pursue."
Woestman said a private citizen had already donated $250 to the city to help buy the Nasal Ranger.
"They gave us $250 to get it started, so we could get it out in the press that if other people wanted to donate, it would definitely go toward this," Woestman said. "The city's willing to buy it, but this is a tight year."
