If something doesn’t smell right in Las Vegas, most people here know to move on.
But what if that bad smell is literally emanating from your neighbor’s house?
The city of Las Vegas is about to adopt a new code to deal with bad odors. A big part of that code will be made possible by a gizmo that Vicki Ozuna is holding in her hand.
Ozuna is the city’s code enforcement manager. And the gizmo she’s holding is called the Nasal Ranger.
“It looks like a large nose with an extension on it, mainly like a gun nose, a radar gun?” she says.
Ozuna and her code enforcement officers tackle complaints that range from a neighbor’s weeds getting too high to the eyesore of a junked car on the street to dangerous buildings and zoning issues.
And now, Code Enforcement is diving into bad smells. The city council is expected to vote today on new code to regulate bad smells.
Vicki Ozuna and the nasal ranger/Photo credit: Brent Holmes
It’s an area the city is pretty familiar with.
In the mid-2000s, a rotten egg and garbage smell permeated the Fremont Street Experience, where most of the city’s casinos reside. The city spent $96,000 to find what amounted to trash and construction debris stuck in storm drains.
The Nasal Ranger, which costs about $1,500, isn’t a seek-and-destroy odor device, though. It’s a contraption designed to give the smeller an objective measurement of smell.
To give an idea of how it works , Ozuna opens a compartment in the Nasal Ranger case and pulls out rubbery strips that are shaped into the outline of a nose. She pulls off plastic to expose the sticky part of the strip, then sticks the entire strip to the rubber nozzle on the Nasal Ranger. Then she tries to describe how
“What the officers are going to do when they are going to measure an odor and determine if it’s a nuisance, they’re going to go out and pull out the Nasal Ranger and set I on zero and zero out their olfactory,” she says. “You’re smelling nothing. So you can have a fresh palate, as you would with wine or something.”
Ozuna presses her nose into the nozzle.
“There is a little meter up here when you breath in, you want to keep the lights green so you know you’re breathing in enough air,” she says, inhaling deeply through her nose. “I just barely hit green … It’s not easy to do.”
Code enforcement officers will write down the time of day, the kind of smell—sweet or pungent—and describe the weather. And they will take four readings in 48 hours. They must get a positive reading all four times.
“Just because you smell something once does not mean it’s a public nuisance it has to be a consistent smell,” Ozuna says.
Code enforcement purchased the Nasal Ranger a year ago. It is only now training with it, though, because it’s taken a while to write an ordinance guiding when, where and how it should be used.
The nasal ranger/Photo credit: Brent Holmes
And all of this because of a cat horder.
There was this house where some 130 cats lived with the owner for about six years, Ozuna says. “And when you pulled up, you could smell it from across the street. The neighbors complained a few times.”
The city determined the house was hazardous to the owner and her daughter. They moved the two out; stripped the house to its bones. Sanitized it and rehabbed it. The owner got a grant from the city to pay for the work, which is to be paid back to the city when the owner dies and the house is sold.
The whole episode got Ozuna thinking the city needed a code for smells, not just for cat hoarders. With legalized medical and now recreational marijuana, she wanted an objective way to say how much smell emanating from a cultivation facility is too much smell?
“I went to the city attorney and said, ‘Hey, I think we need to add this into the ordinance. And with the approval of medical marijuana, we need to address cultivation facilities if their filtration system breaks down.’”
Here’s what the code will not address: properties with horses or goats and chickens. The smells from cooking food – not rotten grease traps – emanating from restaurants. And the city will only go out on an aroma probe if someone complains.
Ozuna doesn’t expect this to be a big part of her job. She only gets five to 10 odor complaints a year.
And right now, the city has just one nasal ranger on hand.
“We do have extra nose pieces,” she adds. “If we start getting a lot of complaints, we may have to look at buying another one or buying additional nose pieces so several officers have the ability to use them.”
