Sechelt council is close to adding nuisance odours to the list of prohibitions in its property maintenance bylaw, although the lack of a mechanism to measure offending fumes was raised by Coun. Doug Wright during the Feb. 3 regular council meeting.
Before council gave three readings to the amended property maintenance bylaw on Feb. 3, Wright brought up the issue.
“I’m not sure how we’re going to measure the odour to know if somebody’s in violation of the bylaw,” Wright said. “And if they are, what are our options?”
Interim corporate officer Gerry van der Wolf said there isn’t any proposed mechanism to measure offending odours in the district.
“It’s complaint based, so if someone puts in a complaint then the bylaw enforcement staff will go and … if it seems that the complaint is reasonable, then that will be brought to the attention of the originator,” van der Wolf said.
“It’s very subjective and that’s one of the reasons it wasn’t part of the bylaw before now, but the reports from staff indicate that they don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”
Mayor Bruce Milne noted that odours can be measured with mechanisms that are available in the province.
“So if it became an issue, we could get devices,” Milne said.
The nuisance odour addition to the property maintenance bylaw in Sechelt states that a nuisance odour is “an odour in the air that is obnoxious, offensive, or interferes with the use or enjoyment of property, endangers personal health or safety, or is offensive to the senses and causes inconvenience or annoyance to a person with a normal sense of smell, except odours related to permitted combustion such as, but not limited to, wood stoves, vehicle emissions thereto.”
The odour prohibition was originally put forward by council to deal with issues of smell emanating from operations at Salish Soils, as well as smells related to marijuana production.
When the question was called, council gave three unanimous readings to the bylaw amendment.
It will come back to a future council meeting for adoption.
