To the Honorable Mayor and Council of the City of Portland

We, the undersigned owners of real property with dwellings thereon located adjacent to and on the west and north of Overlook Park where the city is now filling in the said Park, making one of your so-called Sanitary Fills, so hereby respectfully protest against such fill being made now or at all, for the following reasons:

Same is unhealthful and creates unhealthful condition, which condition remains permanent;

The garbage exudes and fills the air around our houses and permeates our homes with a noisome and offensive odor;

In three houses abutting this fill there are three sick women, one permanently so and the other two permanent semi-invalids;

It is a great damage to our property and renders same less valuable, making it essentially and especially unattractive to any intending buyers.

From the dumping there arises dust and has from the stoves and refuse dumped which settles all around and in our homes.

All of these reasons combined with the noises of the truck and tractor operations on Sunday as well as every other day, render our dwelling uninhabitable and same has made and is making them an unfit place in which to live.

Rats are making their appearance on account of this garbage and threaten to become permanent with us.

For ten years or more, your Body has had and still has the whole of the outdoors in which to locate and erect a place to take care of this garbage and now being forced to dump your garbage somewhere, you are, instead of locating and erecting a place for your garbage dump, taking out your own failure and neglect in the premises on us who have done our best to develop our property to a point where its appearance is presentable, only to have the same ruined by your action.

It is now well established that a so-called Sanitary Fill is actually by experience shown to be permanently unsanitary that it not only renders the atmosphere around and about it, unwholesome but that it percolates into the soil of the adjoining premises, materially effecting its value, and its desirability for residential purposes and we do not feel that the failure on the part of the City Commissioners to attend to this duty of locating, establishing and erecting a place for the disposition of this garbage should result in their visiting upon us a permanent plague like is here involved. Already more damage is done than can be repaired and we respectfully request that these operation cease at once.