The city of Kenmore recently partnered with the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA) in order to ensure that citizen complaints about the odor around town is promptly and properly addressed.

By cooperating with the city of Kenmore, the PSCAA will be able to investigate odor complaints in a much more timely manner. Instead of sending their own investigator out, the city of Kenmore will send a public works official to investigate complaints.

According to Greg Lum, code compliance building inspector for the city of Kenmore and the city’s investigator for the PSCAA, the interlocal agreement is the culmination of about a year’s worth of work between city officials and those at the PSCAA.

“There aren’t really challenges to this, it’s a fairly straight-forward process,” said Mario Pedrosa, supervising inspector at PSCAA. “The most difficult part is to get a timely response were we can get an inspector…there so they can actually say ‘Yes, there is an odor here’.”

As soon as the offensive odor is smelled, residents, business owners or employees of Kenmore businesses are encouraged to file a nuisance odor complaint, but don’t walk off. In order for complaints to be successfully submitted to the PSCAA, an investigator must come out and verify the odor for themselves along with taking a signed statement from the reporting citizen.

As soon as the statement is taken from the reporting citizen, the investigator must then track the odor to its origin. From there, the origin of the offensive smell is then cited and the long process of getting the odor fixed can begin.

However, as of Nov. 20, there had been no called-in complaints about odors, which means that there are no complaints being filed with the PSCAA either.

According to Pedrosa, there has been a mixed bag of successes from the few interlocal agreements between the PSCAA and the local townships. While Covington and Marysville were not successful in significantly changing the odor impacts, the interlocal agreement with Lake Stevens very successful.

“With the city of Lake Stevens, it was very successful,” Pedrosa said. “We were able to document violations, we were able to have the company make significant changes and the problem is really no longer there.”

However, the success in Lake Stevens was only possible with the active response and reporting of odors by the residents thereof. Without those reports, there’s no way for the PSCAA to go after violators of the Clean Air Act.

To report an odor complaint, please contact the city of Kenmore’s Greg Lum at 425-398-8900 or glum@kenmorewa.gov.