Montezuma County Commissioners said Monday they would take steps to reopen the county’s decades‑old policy on visual blight, signaling efforts to start public discussions to revisit the 1990s land‑use comprehensive plan.
“The blight in the county is getting really bad,” Commissioner Jim Candelaria said at Monday’s workshop. He cited near‑daily complaints and increasing frustration among community members expressed recently at town hall meetings, such as one in Pleasant View.
Candelaria emphasized not just trash creating eyesores but a larger concern for environmental and public health issues that he said also lower property values, especially when trash blows onto neighboring yards.
“You know, we talk about personal responsibility, private property rights … all of these come into play. At the end of the day, there are a lot of people not taking care of their property … because trash is junk, trash, blight – it just continues to grow,” Candelaria said.
Officials did not propose a blight ordinance Monday but asked county attorney Stephen Tarnowski to begin reviewing the public process required for adopting any new enforcement.
Blight has been a regular topic at meetings, and in January the Commission brought it forward and said it aimed to start addressing it more directly. Tarnowski emphasized at the time that any blight ordinance requires a public process and likely changes to the 1990 land‑use plan. Past county officials opted for voluntary compliance over stricter code enforcement out of concern about overzealous government intervention.
At Monday’s meeting, Tarnowski outlined the current approach in the plan’s Chapter 5, “Junk, Trash and Visual Blight.” He said a working group drafted the proposal to consider more broadly what the county’s role should be.
“They wanted to promote the image of Montezuma County and the towns, but then they also address some of the issues that they ran into, including where to draw the line,” Tarnowski said. “What is a problem, something that might need to be addressed by a local government, and what is someone’s right as a private property owner.”
The working group at the time rejected adopting a blight ordinance and instead focused on encouraging subdivisions to set their own standards and increasing voluntary compliance.
Commissioners Gerald Koppenhafer and Kent Lindsay agreed that developing those regulations decades ago took considerable time and was at times divisive.
“All through writing the regulations, it was a struggle to determine what is one man’s treasure and what’s one man’s trash. And it’s still very difficult to determine that,” Lindsay said. “So, we’re going to have to be really careful how we word this.”
The county attorney previously said staffing limits make code compliance difficult.
“We’re still trying to get those two land‑use enforcement cases out the door. This has been one area where it has been more difficult than I anticipated, just not having a legal assistant in my office,” Tarnowski said during the weekly attorney’s report.
He noted that while the process is time‑consuming, it remains a high priority for him.
Tarnowski told the commission he has gathered examples from other counties with language for potential ordinances and hopes to share more information publicly before any outreach meetings.
“As it relates to our public process of our junk, trash, blight plan in the land‑use code, I think it would be really good to get a lot of materials together to help inform that discussion, so I will be working on that,” he said.
Commissioners have said their preferred approach is to start with voluntary cleanup and have considered offering help, such as waiving the dumpster tipping fee, which depending on the type of waste, runs $15 to $64 per ton.
Following up on the idea, Candelaria proposed organizing a countywide cleanup day or weekend, similar to a previous tire‑collection event in which the county gathered 30,000 old tires. Similar cleanup events happen in Mancos, Dolores and Cortez.
“For the county, we keep talking about this: Your strategy is let’s help the people if they don’t have a way to get help. Maybe for a day or a weekend, we just post it, think about it,” Candelaria said.
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