Agency’s response to complaint stinks

My nightly trip home from work when passing Cedar Grove Composting involves speeding past the odor, and pulling my shirt up over my nose, like a turtle receding into its shell. The reason I speed past the smell is because after trying to file a complaint a few months ago to the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, driving fast past the odor was my response to the comments made to me by their “Field Inspector II.”

They asked me “where do you smell this odor.” I said “on northbound Highway 529. The closer I got to Marysville the more it smelled.” The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency said “there is nothing we can do because you are able to eliminate the odor by simply driving past the odor.” (The turtle maneuver was my idea). “We can only respond to your complaint if you smell the odor at your home.” I said, “The odor is present from my home as well.” The “field” inspector came to our home, they said no one was home and that “they did not smell anything that day from my home.”

Because the “field” inspector could not smell the odor that one day from my home no complaint would be taken by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency’s “field” inspector — even though my family and I and hundreds of other Snohomish County residents have said that they also smelled the odor on other days without inspectors present.

So I was not able to file a complaint that our Puget Sound “Clean” Air around Marysville’s Highway 529 stinks most of the time and at our home sometimes.

As a matter of fact, we smell it today (Aug. 16), not only at our home but in our home (we live just off of 88th in Marysville).

Let’s drive somewhere — fast!

Michael Deskins

Marysville