Oooh That Smell: Lovell Neighbors Spar Over Sewer Odor

A group of Cascade Canyon neighbors unable to resolve a dispute about a foul sewer odor in their area took their grievances to the Mill Valley City Council this week in a move that city officials acknowledged was a rarity.

City Manager Jim McCann opened Tuesday night’s hearing by suggesting that while city staff proposed a resolution to declare the home at 628 Lovell Ave. a public nuisance and order its abatement, city officials hoped that declaration would spur the parties to find a resolution before it had to do so. 

“It appears that we have a real situation out on Lovell that needs some attention – this hearing could allow us to find a solution,” McCann said. “Sometimes some encouragement allowing people to realize the significance of a situation is helpful.”

The move succeeded - for now.

In the end, while little common ground was evident among the neighbors, several of whom lamented that they personally hadn’t discussed the nearly two-year-old dispute with one another until now, the council delayed any decision for one month to allow a sewer consultant to analyze the problem more closely.

“This is disgusting,” Councilman Andy Berman said. “It’s a terrible situation that needs to get resolved … we’re not playing a game here. There are serious health issues involved here … But the only independent person here doesn’t know what’s going on yet.”

At issue is the Lovell Ave. home of Ken Traverso, whose family moved into the newly built, 4,800-square-foot house in May 2009. The connection between the home and the city’s sewer system is a pressurized pipe called “force main" that ends up at a manhole several hundred feet away near neighbors' homes. Traverso’s attorney Gary Oswald referred to the system as “the Rolls Royce of sewer systems.”

Traverso shares a sewer system connection at a manhole on Lovell Avenue with the residents of 510 and 493 Lovell, the Kramlich and Good families, along with a man who leases a detached studio apartment from the Goods.

Starting in 2010, those neighbors complained of an occasional but extremely foul “rotten egg” odor in their homes, a smell that differs from that of a typical sewage smell, according to city Public Works Director Jill Barnes. City officials determined the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas, a potentially hazardous chemical, entering the homes.

City officials advised the Kramlich and Good families to make changes in their own homes to combat the problem, such as installing a “P trap,” or curved section of pipe, and to prevent the smell from coming into their homes. But city officials said the smell came in through a roof vent instead, and Barnes told the council that she determined that it Traverso’s problem to fix.

“It was pretty clear to me that the odor was coming from the forced lateral,” Barnes said. “These odors should be abated at the source or some place along the lateral before they reach the manhole.”

At some point along the way, in a swarm of sharply worded emails, letters and California Public Records Act requests, Traverso and city officials were unable to resolve the matter. Without a resolution, the neighbors being impacted are losing their patience.

“The quality of our life and the value of property has dropped down (since Traverso built his home),” said Walter Good, who said his teenage daughter had health problems last year that he suspected were connected with the sewer odor. “We’ve never had any problems like this in the previous 27 years we’ve lived here. We’ve been living in the stink for a long time. We’re running out of patience.”

“I’m saddened that we have to be here to do this,” Richard Kramlich added. “We’ve been trying to do this for two years.”

City officials have not had access to the system on Traverso’s property since former engineer Dick Dudak’s inspection of the system when the home’s construction was finished nearly three years ago. The city has not had access to the property since the complaints began in the fall of 2010.

Traverso claims that if the city ordered him to fix the problem, he wouldn’t know what to do, claiming he has had multiple consultants look at the system and they were unable to determine its exact cause.

“I am not standing by idle as has been intimated here,” Traverso. “To make it sound like I’m not responsive is a bit irresponsible. I just don’t know what to do.”

“The system seems to work perfectly,” Oswald added.

The city had hired sewer consultant Bonneau Dickson to investigate the matter but with the dispute at an impasse and city officials without access to Traverso’s property, he had not been able to fully do so yet, Dickson said.

“None of us understands the problem at this time,” he told the council. “If we could run some tests out there we could narrow some things down. Perhaps it would be premature to shut off the alternative of more investigation at this time.”

The council agreed to have Dickson investigate and report back his findings at its March 19 meeting, and Traverso agreed to allow Dickson to access the property. McCann said the city would pay the cost of having Dickson further investigate problem, while the cost of abating the problem would fall to the owner of the system determined to be cause it.