Taos County needs a dedicated code enforcement department
Ordinances mean little without personnel and procedures to enforce them. Taos County has dozens of ordinances on the books, governing everything from where houses can be constructed and businesses can operate, to where residents can ride their ATVs and how many lumens a home’s lights can emit after sundown.
County commissioners, employees and local stakeholders spend months — in some cases, years — poring over drafts of proposed regulations while locked in often contentious negotiations until ordinances are passed. When that happens, everyone breathes a collective, satisfied sigh of relief, feeling as though something meaningful has been accomplished.
But often, nothing really changes. For years, Taos County has employed just one code enforcement officer. For an area spanning over 2,200 square miles, one person isn’t enough to make county ordinances anything more than symbolic in many cases.
More code enforcement officers may soon be added, as Taos County Senior Planner Andy Jones explained at Monday night’s (Aug. 12) meeting, which resumed discussion of the county’s much-needed short-term rental ordinance. The proposed law incentivizes locally-owned short term rentals and restricts second home and investment group vacation properties. We hope more long-term rentals materialize as the housing and rental markets adjust to what is predicted to be dramatically fewer short-term rentals.
Jones said the county plans to add two more code enforcement officers to implement the ordinance, which is a start.
In light of the high public demand for short-term rental regulations, we don’t doubt Taos County will police listings and seek to enforce the ordinance if it’s approved by the commission next week. Our concern is that hundreds of shortterm rentals set to be regulated under this ordinance will mean that existing ordinances — already loosely enforced — will receive even less attention. We suspect a team of three will still fall short of the personnel required to tend to all county laws.
Taos County’s population and its regulatory code continue to grow. Though it would be costly, our county government needs to budget for a dedicated code enforcement department. The county’s current approach of rolling code enforcement under the umbrella of the county planning department is outdated and impotent in comparison to the volume of compliance issues across Taos County.
A code enforcement department would have to be amply staffed — with officers to respond to complaints of code violations, and supporting staff to process them, investigate them, conduct inspections, post notices, and issue sanctions.
Short of that, off-roaders will continue to create dangerous situations on highways where they are prohibited, rogue business owners will keep clogging neighborhoods with traffic where they aren’t permitted to operate, and residents will keep burning unshielded lights on their porches, obscuring views of the Milky Way that are meant to be protected. Locals don’t do this out of malice, but out of ignorance bred by local laws that are too often unenforced.