Suburban sprawl forces a longtime Sacramento business to move. Blame the animal carcasses

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For 50 years, an industrial cookery has quietly fired up the furnaces in eastern Sacramento County for a task that most people don’t like to even think about, much less see or smell.

The Sacramento Rendering Company takes in deceased livestock – “deadstock,” they call it – as well as butcher waste, restaurant grease and, on occasion, a dead zoo elephant or amusement park whale, then reprocesses it all into new uses.

While the plant provides a key niche service for the California meat industry, it also happens to produce a unique, hard-to-describe odor that drifts downwind some days from the exhaust stacks.

That wasn’t a problem when the east county was rural (though who knows what alarms went off in the heads of grazing cows when the odor hit their nostrils?).

Now, however, suburban residential subdivisions are edging closer to the rendering plant. It’s led to nearly 600 odor complaints from newly arrived east county residents in the last three years, according to the Sacramento air quality management district.

With tens of thousands more residences planned for the nearby Highway 16 and Sunrise Boulevard corridors, everyone agrees: The rendering plant needs to move. Again.

Last week, the Sacramento Board of Supervisors gave the plant’s owner a big boost, essentially approving the company’s exit plan by entitling it to turn the 1,000-acre site into a housing development.

Michael Koewler, whose family has owned the plant for three generations, plans to demolish the facility and sell the site to a developer or home builder, while building a new plant elsewhere in the region, farther away from residences.

“As soon as they broke ground on Sunrise-Douglas (subdivisions) across the street, we saw the writing on the wall,” Koewler said. “The world is closing in on me from a development standpoint. We are trying to get out of this situation that we were forced into.”

An original California recycler

The rendering plant is among a handful of animal recycling facilities still in existence in California. Koewler calls it one of the original California recyclers. His family has a contract with Raley’s supermarkets dating to 1938 to handle the entrails and other discards of the butchery business, as well as contracts with restaurants and other companies that need disposing of animal remains.

They skin, cook and compact deadstock, and send it back to market as pet food, poultry feed, biofuel, oil for rubber products and tallow for soap.

Koewler’s grandfather, a butcher from Ohio, launched the company in 1913 as the Sacramento Reduction and Tallow Works on Riverside Boulevard south of Sutterville Road, a marshy site that was at the time in an undeveloped area a few miles south of the city of Sacramento.

In the 1950s, Sacramento opened development for the new Land Park neighborhood, and the rendering company, seen as a nuisance, found itself run out of town by court order. The Koewlers relocated the plant to its current grassy hillside off Kiefer Road, a mile north of Highway 16 and a few yards west of Sunrise Boulevard.

This time, Koewler’s company hopes for a more orderly exit. It has spent the last decade planning a community on the site, to be called NewBridge, where as many as 3,000 residential units could house more than 8,238 residents, with added space for businesses that could employ 2,530 workers.

Koewler says he is a renderer, not a developer. Nevertheless, his move is helping launch what could be the biggest development boom over the next half-century in Sacramento.

Development in Sacramento County

His NewBridge community is one of a handful of proposed developments that will turn the Jackson Highway corridor into a vast suburban area of an estimated 50,000 residents, essentially merging the Rancho Cordova, Vineyard and Elk Grove areas.

The area, with Highway 16 as its spine, is now a mish-mash of industrial and agricultural uses, including aggregate mines that provide the materials for construction concrete in Northern California. Further out on the highway, where the rendering plant is, much of the land is covered by ranchettes and grasslands.

Those uses, like the rendering plant, will be phased out over decades in favor of housing plans – some controversial – under consideration by the county Board of Supervisors.

Environmentalists say the development plans represent a new round of suburban sprawl. They are calling on the county to insist on making the projects live-work communities, rather than bedroom communities for commuters, and to require substantial transit, bike and walking facilities to avoid huge volumes of car traffic.

Amador County officials have filed objections as well, saying Sacramento County is playing the neighborhood bully. The Jackson Highway corridor is the main route to the Amador wine country. Sacramento’s plans will turn it into a stop-and-go traffic jam that will hit the Amador economy by making it harder for businesses and residents to get to and from Sacramento.

Meanwhile, major property owners and developers who stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars are arguing over fees and entitlements, as each tries to position itself to build.

Koewler’s attorney, George Phillips, said it may be several more years before NewBridge can begin construction, given additional needed approvals and the possibility of lawsuits.

Koewler, meanwhile, is pleased by last week’s penultimate approvals, but is annoyed as well. He first first launched his effort to move the rendering plant more than a decade ago.

“It is turning out to take way longer than expected,” he said. “I get frustrated. The more we stay there, the more opportunities for people to file complaints on odor issues that would impact my ability to relocate the plant.”

This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 5:00 AM.