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Wednesday, Mar 27, 2024
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Soiling Its Reputation

The Goldfish Point Café enjoys a unique location with foot traffic that most businesses would envy: The world-famous La Jolla Cove draws in tourists every day. Pushing back, however, is a certain odor.

On particular days, aromas from the coastline can get so bad they give customers the dry heaves, said business owner Claude-Anthony Marengo.

Marengo, who has owned the café since 1991 and has frequented La Jolla Cove since childhood, said the overpowering, ammonialike smell is a relatively recent occurrence. He estimates he has lost 38 percent to 40 percent of his business because of it.

The smell varies with the wind and warmth, said Terry Underwood, general manager of the nearby Grande Colonial La Jolla hotel, where rooms start at $229 per night. With an onshore breeze, the problem impacts businesses farther north on Prospect Street — which along with Girard Avenue form a shopping district where merchants sell luxury goods.

“It is safe to say that all businesses are affected, either indirectly or directly in the village,” said Marengo, president of the La Jolla Village Merchants Association Inc., adding the farthest the smell travels is midway up Girard. Because of the smell, he said, visitors arrive and quickly move on, rather than stay the night or linger for the day.

Trouble in Paradise

By now the smell issue is at the heart of a dispute playing out in one of the priciest ZIP codes in the state, and one of its most attractive vacation destinations. Swimmers love La Jolla Cove. The community’s natural beauty has beckoned landscape painters since the 19th century. Much more recently, the presence of harbor seals at nearby Casa Beach (aka Children’s Pool) has been a flashpoint for the animal rights movement.

At La Jolla Cove, sea lions are thick. A person walking the area might easily mistake a sleeping sea lion for a rock, said Vidur Mahadeva, a Reno physician who was visiting with his family.

Many La Jollans attribute the smell to the marine mammals’ urine and scat, and to droppings from the cormorants that congregate on the nearby rocks. The city of San Diego occasionally sprays the rocks with an environmentally friendly microbial foam to clean up the bird dung.

At noon on a recent Monday, crowds packed the patios of Stella La Jolla and Cody’s La Jolla on lower Girard. At the cove, two young women caught sight of nine sea lions sunning their bellies in a tight group on the tiny sand beach that forms among the rocks.

“Let’s go look at them,” one exclaimed after letting out a delighted scream.

“Oh, wow!”

A pelican cruises past, wings motionless. City signs at the foot of the stairs warn people not to approach the sea lions and that harassing the animals is against the law.

The smell on that particular day seemed mild — just a pungent ocean smell — compared to a day in February when an unappealing stink wafted up to a Prospect Street building that housing offices and restaurants.

Odor in the Court

Marengo and others in La Jolla’s business community have been casting about for a new solution to the cove smell since late March, when a San Diego Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit against the city of San Diego.

“Sea lions are proliferating throughout California, and that is neither the fault nor the responsibility of San Diego,” read a statement issued by city attorney Jan Goldsmith on March 27, the day the judge stopped the case from going to trial. “The city can address the pooping habits of wild animals as a policy matter, but it cannot be compelled to do so by the courts.”

Citizens For Odor Nuisance Abatement, a nonprofit led by George Hauer, owner of George’s at the Cove restaurant, filed the suit in December 2013, seeking to get the city to clean up the area, which it called a public nuisance. Blumenthal, Nordrehaug & Bhowmik of La Jolla has represented the organization pro bono. The group plans to appeal, firm principal Norm Blumenthal said in an email, “unless the city agrees to scoop the poop.”

Marengo, the café owner, is also principal at Marengo Morgan Architects in La Jolla. He argues the problem is largely manmade because the city installed a fence around La Jolla Cove, keeping people off the bluffs and preserving the area for animals.

Recently, the city created a gate through the fence — though that has drawn flak, as well. One activist at a recent La Jolla meeting on the matter held a sign reading, “Lock The Gate Before It’s Too Late.”

If the city put up the fence, it should take responsibility for the beaches and bluffs, Marengo said. Alternately, he said, it should allow people to go in and clean up the mess, acting at their own risk.

A Federal Line in the Sand

Complicating matters, however, are laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The La Jolla Town Council set aside its April 9 meeting to discuss the animals at the cove and the laws protecting them. The advisory body promised to discuss a solution to the odor issue at its May meeting.

Among those who spoke was Renee Owens of Sage Wildlife Biology LLC, who urged those concerned with the issue to get the proper permits to go in and clean up, and to ask the federal government for help.

“There are ways to deal with nuisance animals,” she said. The federal government will not, however, give people permission to harass sea lions on an unlimited basis for an unlimited amount of time, she said.

Owens urged merchants to do their own fundraising.

Hauer, of George’s at the Cove, called for business groups in San Diego’s hospitality community to come together and lobby area politicians about the smell problem.

“On a personal level, I have to tell you, imagine coming to work every single day and being hit in the face with the smell of sea lion [excrement],” Hauer said. “… Forget the business implications. I hate going to work on the days when it smells ….”

By now the issue has created some sensational stories. The San Diego Reader reported in a January 2014 cover story that a professional boxer and a group traveling with him checked out of the iconic, pink-towered La Valencia Hotel a short time after arriving because of the smell, costing the hotel more than $5,000 in lost revenue. The story was repeated in the merchants’ lawsuit.

Privately, some restaurateurs want to tamp down the publicity, which by now has reached a national audience. The New York Times wrote a story about the issue in late 2012.

One eatery near the cove has reportedly installed several machines to put a pleasant smell in the air.

One person at the La Jolla Town Council meeting asked whether it would be possible to put the sea lions on birth control — a sentiment that got some laughs.

There was a controversy, however, over whether there were too many or not enough sea lions. Mark Lowry, a federal biologist at the meeting, said sea lion populations are still coming back from the days when they were hunted in the 19th and 20th centuries. Complicating matters today is the current El Nino temperature pattern, which makes it harder for the population to find food, and which is blamed for the number of sickly sea lion pups washing ashore.

Lowry estimated there were 426,000 sea lions split between Southern California, Baja California, and their offshore islands.

La Jolla merchants might consider themselves lucky in one regard: Not all of the sea lions have staked out spots of La Jolla’s rare real estate.

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