DES MOINES, Iowa — The city of Des Moines says the number of complaints they’ve gotten for odor around the city has gone down since installing odor monitors across the area. 

In 2022 the city hired an air quality consultant to study and analyze odor complaints. Initially there were 10 odor monitors installed, and then a year ago, they added 10 more.

The problem has mostly been near downtown, on the east side, near animal processing facilities. Some residents call it the “Eastside Funk.”

So far this year there have been 188 odor complaints through September in Des Moines. In that same period last year, there were almost double the number of complaints: 331 January through September 2024.

“The project, as it stands right now, is about $200,000 a year. Fortunately, we’ve got good partners in the industry, so we are splitting the cost and the city’s cost is just right around $50,000 for each year of this program,” Dalton Jacobus, the Neighborhood Inspections Administrator for the City of Des Moines said. “So it’s kind of a win, win. We’re getting a good program out of it. Industries getting access to the data, real time monitoring. So they’re looking at the same thing that we can see, so they can fix things before we even call them.”

The technology measures and logs data based on odor-producing chemicals. 

Odor typically gets worse in the summer and fall. In 2024, September had the most odor complaints with 64. This September there were 33 complaints. 

“Technology has come a long way since the city adopted an older program 20 something years ago. We looked at what technology was there and how we could apply it to maybe meet our needs and then have a more of a data driven program. So it’s still kind of in the fact finding stage, and then we’ll have policy recommendations come in the next year or so for the council to consider,” Jacobus said. “The data is immense. So we were just sitting on a mountain of data that we’re coming through monthly, building reports and then identifying some kind of trends. So we get those reports and then we share them with whoever wants them.”

The odor and complaints go down in the winter, so this 2025 summer and fall data was important to analyze. Meanwhile, the city wants people to know, there aren’t health risks to this odor. 

“It’s a quality of life program. So we’re not worried about people getting sick because it smells so bad, maybe unpleasant,” he said. “But we’re really looking at it from a quality of life and a nuisance standpoint and not a public health standpoint.”

Des Moines is believed to be the first major city using such a system.