Fertilizer Plant’s Neighbors Raise a Stink Over Odor : Environment: Residents complain that a new recycling procedure has added to the normal smell. Air quality and city officials point to decaying trees and shrubs, not chemicals.

Something smells in Maria Elena Martinez’s neighborhood, and she’s convinced that the city’s recycling program is the culprit.

Martinez and her neighbors live downwind from Whittier Fertilizer Co. Even plant officials admit that the place stinks at times--it’s just the nature of the business.

But Martinez and some of her neighbors say the odors have gotten worse since the city started hauling 600 tons of grass clippings, tree branches and other organic waste to the plant every month as part of a recycling program that started last year.

“Sometimes during the night, I wake up choking,” said Martinez, 67, who has lived in her home on Chapelle Avenue since 1956.

Martinez heads a group of neighbors who are lobbying the company and city officials to get rid of the smell.

Last month, Martinez and neighbor Mary Lou Limon went to the City Council to complain. Limon, who lives less than a quarter of a mile from the plant, said the odors fill her living room and bedrooms.

“It burns the eyes sometimes,” she said. “I’m home all day, and I always try to have all my windows closed.”

Resident Bertha Osborn said the odors have gotten stronger. “It doesn’t smell like fertilizer; it’s like chemicals,” she said.

Whittier Fertilizer owner Bob Osborn acknowledges that the piles of manure and compost have odors, but insisted that no chemicals have been added. “We have environmentally safe products,” said Osborn, who is not related to Bertha Osborn.

The company has sold fertilizer since 1930, when Osborn’s father-in-law began putting steer manure in gunnysacks and selling them to citrus farmers. Back then, he said, the nearest neighbors were the pigs and cows that produced the manure.

In 1956, the first housing development was built across the street on Kruse Road. Some of the first home buyers say they did not complain then about the odor of pigs and cows because it was not strong.

“My dad used to come and say: ‘I love the smell out here,’ ” Bertha Osborn said.

Officials from Pico Rivera and the South Coast Air Quality Management District have inspected the plant, and determined Dec. 8 that the odor was coming from piles of decaying trees and shrubs.

Assistant City Manager Ann Negendank defended the recycling program, describing it as one of the environmentally safe ways to save landfill space.

Pico Rivera and other cities are under a state mandate to reduce the amount of garbage they send to county landfills. Within two years, the cities must reduce that amount by 25%, and by 50% by 2000, Negendank said.

As part of the program, Whittier Fertilizer gives away organic mulch and compost to residents once a month.

Osborn, the plant’s owner, said that residents on Kruse Road complained in April about mounds of compost and cow manure only a few hundred yards from their back fences. He said he moved the piles elsewhere, and the complaints died down.

After learning of the recent complaints from a different group of residents, Osborn has been arriving at the plant before dawn, sometimes as early as 4 a.m., to check for odors, he said.

“I want to find any problems I can and correct them,” Osborn said. “But I’m never going to be an odor-free business.”