Sanford Residents Demand Fix as Wastewater Plant Stench Persists

The stench hit Denny Gibbs like a wall outside his downtown Sanford home. "Sometimes it smells like a big pile of fish stacked outside of your door," said Gibbs, who has lived in the area for more than 20 years. "It comes and goes. But when it comes, it really blankets the whole area. It's nauseating."

Gibbs was far from alone. Residents throughout downtown Sanford complained for months about a raw sewage odor traced to the North Water Reclamation Facility, the city's wastewater treatment plant off East Seminole Boulevard overlooking Lake Monroe. The smell grew noticeably worse after the plant received what Public Works Director Brynt Johnson described as a "toxic load" on Valentine's Day. Johnson said his department adjusted the treatment process to compensate and that staff subsequently reported no unusual odors, but the equipment failures underpinning the crisis had already compounded.

"We adjusted the treatment process to be able to recover from the toxic load we received," Johnson said.

The deeper problem was a broken odor-control exhaust system that could not be repaired until November. City crews installed a temporary, non-custom-made fan as an interim measure while a custom-built exhaust system was fabricated and shipped. That temporary fan then failed as well, leaving downtown without any effective odor mitigation. Mayor Art Woodruff, himself a downtown resident who acknowledged receiving a high volume of complaints, described the custom-build timeline: "Because the new exhaust system needs to be custom built, it has taken some time to arrive and install. The project should be completed by late November."

City Manager Norton Bonaparte Jr. posted a message to the city's website and social media accounts confirming the plant as the odor source. "We understand this is not just an inconvenience — it affects your daily lives, and we take that seriously," Bonaparte said. "We appreciate your continued patience as we work toward a full and lasting resolution."

Residents near First Street and the Park on Mellonville described conditions that tested that patience. Sanford resident Samantha Frazer said she had stopped driving through downtown with her windows down. "It's literally every day, it's crazy and what does it smell like? It smells like (expletive) just straight up crap," Frazer said. She and her neighbors had posted repeatedly in local Facebook groups demanding answers, receiving replies from city officials that amounted, in her telling, to: "We were working on it. We've had an overflow and da, da, da."

On a Facebook page devoted to Sanford, one woman wrote that she had to "hold my nose when I ride by on the lakefront," comparing the smell to "baby diapers." Another resident offered a more pointed take: "The city needs to buy some Febreze in bulk."

The odor problem did not stand alone. A major wastewater pipeline failure triggered a separate repair project, with crews installing roughly 4,000 feet of new pipe and deploying septic tank trucks to transport sewage in the interim. City officials maintained that modernization work was underway and that reserves were available to cover costs. But the simultaneous failures drew sharp criticism, with one community member stating she had "expressed my frustration repeatedly about the ongoing mismanagement, poor planning, and lack of urgency within this process," and warning it would not be the last episode of its kind "until we see real accountability and competent decision making from leadership within."

City crews were also upgrading the plant's sludge drying system as part of the broader repair effort. It was not the first time the aging facility had forced emergency measures: odor control units had to be ordered the prior year when conditions became similarly unbearable at the North Water Reclamation Facility, and reporters from News 6 had been tracking the latest round of equipment failures since September, when the mayor first acknowledged multiple breakdowns at the plant.