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Platte County neighbors say Kansas City, Missouri's, newest plan to build a new wastewater plant in the area stinks.
Jeana Houlihan lives next door to the new proposed wastewater treatment site.
"Well at first I thought, there's no way they would plan on building here," Houlihan said of her new potential neighbor.
The new plant would replace an aging and potentially flood-prone Todd Creek Treatment Plant a few hundred feet down the road from where she lives.
The current site is out of sight, out of mind, but not entirely out of smell.
"And sometimes [the smell] is so bad that we have to stay inside and sometimes the smells actually permeate our homes," Houlihan said.
The plant needs to be moved to a new, nearby site because flood plain maps show the old facility square in the middle of a potential flood zone.
The chosen location is right on the line of KCMO city limits, and right up against unincorporated Platte County.
Neighbors say because they don't live in the city, they don't have a say in the decision.
"Every night the cattle are there and we have the most beautiful sunset," Houlihan said of the proposed site which overlooks her front yard. "And we hate to see that environment disturbed."
The city says the new plant would accommodate growth in the north that the current plant just can't keep up with.
Neighbors say there's no problem with a growing city that produces more wastewater, they'd just prefer it to flow anywhere else but their direction.
After all, that's the worry when it comes to the new facility even closer to Houlihan's home. She'd be able to see it from her front yard, but would she smell it?
At a public meeting meant to show how the new plant would work and be built, an engineer explained the odor control plan.
"There's odor control that's going to be in place, two different technologies," the engineer said. "There are no open clarifiers, they simply don't exist in this project."
At that meeting, engineers, designers, and KCMO water treatment staff explained that the new, far more modern style of treatment plant would be a lot less noticeable to the nose.
They said the most odoriferous parts of the process would be covered or non-existent.
Neighbors say they'll believe it when they smell it.
Before the meeting ended, a city spokesperson said that resident suggestions of a new location would be evaluated by engineers, and that the first public meeting discussing the new plant would not be the last.
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