Ventura Residents Raise Stink About Odor

When the wind dies and the air is humid, the scent of this fair city can wrinkle the nose.

Or at least in certain sections of the community. Sometimes. Just a bit.

But city officials say not to worry. That’s just the way Ventura smells.

Downtown property owner Andy Chakires said an odor--part sewer and part natural gas--has permeated parts of Ventura in recent weeks.

Mind you, 73-year-old Chakires says his sense of smell isn’t what it used to be. But people who rent retail space from him on East Main Street tell him they have noticed the unsavory aroma.

One of those tenants is Ingrid Schuh, owner of the Follow Your Dream gift store in the 400 block of East Main. Schuh said she followed her nose about two weeks ago and wondered whether a sewer pipe had cracked. It hadn’t.

Then Chakires’ handyman detected the smell wafting near the beachfront Holiday Inn. A local real estate agent noticed the traveling stench at the corner of Main and California streets.

And another Chakires tenant, Audrey Gaffney, said her husband recently has detected the smell drifting by the couple’s candy store, Atelier de Chocolate, on the same block. “We’ve been here 10 years and this is the first time either of us noticed anything like this,” she said.

Perhaps, he speculated, the smell comes from construction downtown, where a 10-screen movie theater and parking garage are being built.

Not so, say city officials.

It’s a variety of sources that combine to produce a “soup or stew of odors” at certain times under certain conditions, said Deputy City Manager Steve Chase, acknowledging that people do raise a stink from time to time about weird smells.

“You’ve got a lot of stuff that smells in our environment,” he said.

Sources Chase cites include the Pictsweet Mushroom Farms and two waste water treatment plants, all near Ventura Harbor, as well as farm fields, onshore and offshore oil and gas deposits, and the residue of Ventura’s oil boom lying on the ground.

And at the end of November, you can add the smell of chicken manure, Chase said.

Complaints from residents pour in every year about that time when farmers apply manure to their fields, he said.

Chase has a philosophical perspective. His advice, in a nutshell: Deal with it.

“Life goes on,” he said. “Seek a balance between what naturally exists and your urban environment. And at the end of the day, wish your neighbor well.”