Something is rotten in Langley
Published 7:00 am Saturday, October 5, 2002
For the past 89 years, something foul at Langley City Hall has escaped detection.
The oversight, some say, was awful, while others preferring a more colorful homonym call it offal.
Either way, what the Langley City Council did about it this week delved into the archaic and went back to a time when Langley was a smellier place.
On a mission Wednesday night to remove a dozen obsolete, repetitive and just plain strange ordinances from the city’s books, the council turned the aged and yellowing pages of Langley’s municipal law history back to the beginning — 1913 — to remove a law prohibiting the dumping of manure, animal parts or other “nauseating substance” within city limits. The law, identified as Ordinance No. 4, was one of the first passed when the city incorporated almost nine decades ago. It was also, by agreement of council members in 2002, the most out of date, considering the cisterns and public horse stables of old are long gone and curbside trash disposal is now ubiquitous.
Drawn in by the curiously written ordinance, council members could not help commenting on its phraseology, including a prohibition against dumping “unsound beef, pork, fish, hides, skins, or any putrid carcasses.”
“That’s, like, Dickens’ language,” said council member Neil Colburn as he giggled over the text.
Of particular interest, as evidenced by the longest discussion of a single issue during the 90-minute meeting, was the term “offal,” which appears in the ordinance in several places. The word, which is the label for the waste portions of a butchered animal, had even Langley Mayor Lloyd Furman thinking up slogans for bumper stickers and T-shirts.
“Offal happens,” Furman said, getting laughs from a small public turnout at the meeting.
Though the council eventually got around to passing a first reading to delete the ordinance, it was with some reluctance. City resident Barbara Seitle said that while she applauded the city for taking the time to remove obsolete ordinances from the books, an exception should almost be made in this case.
“I think we should keep this one,” she said.
When the ordinance is wiped off the books in a future vote, it will be one of the last signed by Langley’s first mayor, Frank Furman. Lloyd Furman, Frank Furman’s grandson, did not miss the irony or humor in his being responsible from tearing his ancestor’s work from the history books.
“I doubt if anything will be as funny as that,” he said.
Other ordinances up to be erased at a future council meeting include a measure regarding building safety inspections, two laws governing the operation of the city’s former fire department, and several passages about long-defunct expense and reserve funds.
