PROVO -- Hurrying to meet a fast-approaching deadline, Kevin Kuhni and his attorney offered revisions to Provo's proposed rendering plant ordinance Tuesday.
Kuhni, owner of the John Kuhni & Sons Inc. animal rendering plant, also showed the Provo City Council a plan to add equipment and other steps to help eliminate profuse odors that have reportedly been increasing at his operation in recent years.Kuhni and his attorney, Bruce Baird, have been in negotiations with the council's attorneys for nearly two weeks in an effort to reach some sort of compromise on the ordinance. The original ordinance was drafted exclusively by council attorneys. It was considered too stringent by Kuhni and other rendering plant experts, so the council delayed a vote on the anti-odor laws and gave the Kuhnis several weeks to negotiate.
"We said at the beginning that 70 to 80 percent of the things in the ordinance are unobjectionable," Baird told the council during Tuesday's informal non-voting session. "I still think that's correct."
To dramatically curb odors produced at their site, the Kuhnis and their hired experts proposed adding a cold air condenser at their site -- some- thing scheduled to be delivered by Aug. 19. Kuhni estimates the machinery will take two months to install.
Kuhni also wants to add a boiler to incinerate noncondensables. According to the Kuhni team, the boiler would eliminate up to 75 percent of the current "high-intensity" odor emissions at the plant.
"The remaining 25 percent of the odor emission from a typical rendering plant is to be treated at Kuhni by the existing air scrubber," according to a copy of the Kuhni plan.
There were a host of other odor-controlling proposals included in the three-and-a-half-page Kuhni plan. But Baird cautioned that it would be virtually impossible to eliminate all odors generated at the Kuhni site and objected to a provision in the original ordinance that might allow "a death penalty" for the Kuhni operation if it even once violated smell thresholds in the ordinance.
"One smell a year doesn't justify the death penalty," Baird said. "Two smells a year doesn't justify the death penalty. . . . It's difficult to say 'no odor.' If it's not offensive to reasonable people, who cares? If it is offensive to reasonable people, then it's a problem."
One challenge facing the council is who will be the ultimate authority to decide whether the odors coming from the Kuhni plant violate the ordinance? And what is the mechanism by which the odors will be measured?
Mark Hathaway, the council's chairman, wants the city to somehow determine production levels at the Kuhni plant before 1991 -- when complaints from area residents and businesses about the rendering plant's odors were relatively mild.
"It may not work out," Hathaway conceded of his idea. "But it certainly should be considered."
A revised version of the rendering plant ordinance could be given to the council by Friday, according to council attorney Neil Lindberg. The council may vote on the ordinance as soon as July 27.
Baird told the council the tight three-week timetable for revising the ordinance and developing other plans made an already challenging task even more difficult.
He also requested more time than the currently proposed nine months for the Kuhnis to comply with any future ordinance, citing lengthy equipment construction and installation time frames.
"These things take time," Baird said. " And even when you get them, they have to be tweaked. So you need time to tweak stuff."
Some members of the council, however, were unsympathetic to requests for additional time, saying the Kuhnis had already stalled for years.
"Let's not paint this picture that we're under this big time crunch," Hathaway said, "because the time crunch started years ago."
Said Baird in his closing comments to the council: "We trust that next Tuesday you'll hear everybody's pitches and you'll do the right thing."