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The Portland City Council amended odor codes this week in response to the closure of Vietnamese restaurant Pho Gabo earlier this year. Three city commissioners and Mayor Ted Wheeler voted in favor of the change at the Nov. 13 meeting. The code change was spearheaded by Commissioner Carmen Rubio.
“I’d like to thank the staff for their great and urgent work on this project,” Rubio said. “This is an important step to ensure that small businesses and restaurants in our community can operate without concern for a very subjective odor standard. As a community, we aspire to walkable neighborhoods with easily accessible services, including restaurants, and these changes provide the needed clarity for these businesses to keep serving without fear of complaints.”
Commissioner Dan Ryan thanked Rubio for her responsiveness and leadership in “what became a big issue in the media.”
It was WW that first reported the saga of Pho Gabo, in which one persistent neighbor complained about the smell of meat cooking in the vicinity of the Roseway restaurant for a solid 18 months, resulting in cascading fines for odor code violations for the small business. The owner, Eddie Dong, chose to close that location of Pho Gabo in February rather than make expensive structural upgrades to his restaurant that may or may not have satisfied the unhappy neighbor.
The new city code goes into effect March 1. The law will require five or more people to complain about odors within 30 days before Property Compliance Services will open an odor investigation. The complainants must live within 150 feet of the business.
Also, restaurants will now have an allowance of 30 minutes for continuous odor emissions rather than the current 15-minute daily allowance.
Dong is still operating Pho Gabo restaurants in Hillsboro and Happy Valley but does not plan to open a business in Multnomah County again. He is happy to see the change to the city code but “for me, it’s only too late,” he says.
“It happened to me and then they changed the code, like I’m the decoy or the bait or something,” Dong says. “Nothing is going to happen to them, but a lot of things happen to me. All the stress, my personal finance. It took part of my livelihood—a third of my income is from there.”
Dong hired an attorney to help him recoup the fines Pho Gabo accrued under the old odor code, about $5,000.
“They haven’t done anything,” he says. “They just say it, but they never even budge or do anything. That’s the only reason I ran out and got a lawyer. That’s the only way to make them go faster. So that’s where we’re at right now.”