Van Nuys Hot-Tub Maker Is Fined $3,400 for Fumes

A Van Nuys hot-tub manufacturer Monday pleaded no contest to charges that his plant emitted chemical fumes and was fined $3,400, averting a second lengthy trial in Los Angeles Municipal Court.

The eight-week trial of Custom Home Spas Inc. and its president, Al Weaver, ended last month with jurors deadlocked over whether the company was responsible for odors that prompted dozens of complaints from teachers and pupils at Sylvan Park Elementary School.

A mistrial was declared, but the city attorney’s office immediately requested a new trial.

On Monday, after no-contest pleas were entered on six nuisance-odor counts, Municipal Judge Barbara A. Meier placed Custom Home Spas on two years’ probation and imposed a fine of $2,000 and penalty assessments of $1,400.

Deputy City Atty. Keith Pritsker said he will request dismissal of a seventh count if the firm pays the fine and penalties by June 17.

Jurors acquitted the company of an eighth count last month in the lone verdict the panel reached.

If the company pays its fine on time, Pritsker said, he will ask the court to dismiss all nine misdemeanor charges pending against Weaver. The prosecutor said he also expects to request the dropping of charges against Salvador Medina and Louis Octavio, two employees of the spa company whose trials are pending.

Pritsker called the plea bargain “very fair . . . in light of the circumstances of the case and the length of trial.”

He said the fine “will help to assure that other . . . manufacturers will be more thoughtful and careful about the rights of other neighbors in their vicinity.”

But Weaver, a 65-year-old Sylmar resident, said he was “very upset” with the outcome. “I was forced into this plea because I ran out of money,” he said.

The charges were filed after air-quality officials said the annoying, and sometimes nauseating, odors at the school from September, 1983, to May, 1984, came from styrene used to make the company’s fiberglass tubs.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District revoked the company’s operating permits in June, 1984.

The plant, at 15001 Calvert St., is 350 feet from the school grounds.

After the mistrial was declared, some jurors said they believed other companies in the industrial area ringing the school might also have been responsible for the odors.

Custom Home Spas no longer operates at the site.