If you happened to visit the Archuleta County website on Wednesday morning, October 31, seeking information about the County’s ‘Nuisance Ordinance” and about how that ordinance is to be enforced, you might have come across this page:
A blank page, essentially. Just a title… and no information at all.
When I spoke to Aspen Springs resident Andy Davis on Sunday morning — when he was expecting a crew to arrive at his mother’s property at 187 Bill’s Place, and begin an Archuleta County-enforced trash cleanup that his mother had never authorized — he made a comment just as we ended our conversation.
“If I can’t stop the County from taking away my mother’s property, then they will be able to do this same thing all over Aspen Springs.”
Others may have the same concern — especially Mr. Davis’ neighbors in one of the poorest areas of Archuleta County.
I myself have that same concern.
So a bit of history, leading up to the threat — a threat that seems to be playing out at 187 Bill’s Place — that our County government is developing a de facto process for stealing property from anyone unable or unwilling to meet certain aesthetic standards. I’m not clear who is setting those aesthetic standards… or what, exactly, constitutes a ‘nuisance’… and what doesn’t.
I do know a couple of things. Archuleta County has a budget of about $33 million, and employs a full-time attorney who can — theoretically — spend hours and hours filing lawsuits against property owners in the County. Many of the community’s poorest residents would, of course, be financially and intellectually unable to defend themselves against said lawsuits filed by their very wealthy government.
The County’s ‘Nuisance Ordinance’ (which you can download here) was first approved in 2008, then amended in 2009. Much of the work involved in the ordinance’s development was initiated by Ronnie Zaday, who served as a County Commissioner from 2005 through 2009.
Ms. Zaday had recently purchased property in Aspen Springs, on a quiet gravel road called Bill’s Place. From her property, she was able to view a property that had been owned and occupied by Warren Goodman and his family for the previous decade. The Goodman family lived in several old travel trailers. In 2008, it was perfectly legal to live in a travel trailer in Archuleta County. And it was perfectly legal to maintain piles of trash on one’s private property, if one so desired.
Ms. Zaday, a Republican, got herself elected to the Board of County Commissioners in 2004 and seemingly made it a personal goal to rid her neighborhood — and all neighborhoods within the unincorporated county — of unsightly trash and junk.
Archuleta County was established by the Colorado legislature in 1885, and a County government was established as the local arm of the State of Colorado, to help maintain the health, safety, and general welfare of the local residents. Presumably, in 1885, health, safety and welfare were important concerns, as they are today. The establishment of a Sheriff’s office was likely one of the first acts undertaken by the new Board of County Commissioners, to ensure the Rule of Law — in what was still, at that time, pretty much the Wild Wild West. No doubt the construction of a County Courthouse was one of the next projects.
The government also began to record the ownership of real estate, to minimize the conflicts over land and to ensure that the County government could properly and efficiently collect property taxes. A County Treasurer became necessary to keep track of the collected taxes. At some point, the Board of County Commissioners commenced to maintain the dirt roads that were being constructed, now and then and here and there, throughout the County’s 1,350 square miles.
As the community slowly grew — from 826 people in 1890 to about 13,500 in 2018 — the value of real estate went up or down, depending upon the mood of the economy, but the amount of property taxes and sales taxes grew slowly and steadily, and the BOCC began to take on new projects and pass new regulations to improve the local health, safety and welfare. Some of the new projects were mandated by state law, but other projects and rules were invented by the locally-elected Commissioners, based on their personal whims.
Occasionally, the Board of County Commissioners took actions that benefitted only a select few community residents, or perhaps even the Commissioners themselves. We used to make a joke that, in order to get your road graded or plowed in a timely fashion, you had to be a friend of one of the commissioners. Equity and justice — the fair treatment of all residents, regardless of social or economic status — occasionally fell by the wayside. Those of us who’ve been observing the County government closely have seen that sort of thing happen… even within the past ten years.
I’ve been following the progress of the ‘Nuisance Ordinance’ since it was first suggested by then-Commissioner Ronnie Zaday circa 2006. On the face of it, a “nuisance ordinance” might seem like a reasonable type of regulation. But maybe not? The Archuleta County ordinance suggests, for example, that keeping automobiles or snowmobiles on my private property will be harmful to the health and safety of my neighbors.
From the Ordinance:
The keeping, storage, depositing or accumulation of motorized or recreational vehicles deemed to be detrimental to or presenting an existing or potential risk to the public health, safety and general welfare.
How, exactly, a truck parked on my neighbor’s property is detrimental to the public health, safety and general welfare is perhaps not adequately explained in the ordinance. But we can certainly understand that an ex-Commissioner, for example, might prefer to look out on a wild landscape of pine trees and scrub oak and browsing deer…
…without having to view a neighbor’s old truck, or travel trailer. This old truck, however, may have been stored on this property — legally — long before the County Nuisance Ordinance was even a gleam in a Commissioner’s eye.
The question that seems to be facing our community, in 2018, is whether a County law intended to remove junk cars has now become a tool for stealing real estate from long-time residents, on behalf of wealthy newcomers…