Edgewood uses cannabis tax revenue to clean up nuisance properties

Mar. 9—EDGEWOOD — Looking down on what he called a "million-dollar view," Brad Hill saw the potential for building an affordable house on the site of a what is an unofficial dump.

Hill's eyes fell upon a vacant and dilapidated trailer — surrounded by abandoned junk and piles of garbage.

Even in this small Santa Fe County town of 6,000 people, they call these sites nuisance properties.

"People will come and dump trash on these sites," Hill, the town planning and zoning manager, said of the trailer, which was full of buckets, canned food from decades past, a pyramid-shaped stack of video cassettes and — almost certainly — rodents.

It's one of more than a dozen such properties Edgewood is tearing down, with funding provided by an unusual source: cannabis excise tax money.

Hill said the money, derived from taxes on the three now-legal cannabis shops in town, amounts to between $7,000 and $8,000 every month. For the most part, the cost of tearing down derelict houses — many of them manufactured — is about $5,000.

An Edgewood native, Hill has served as a town councilor, mayor and, for a while, the affordable housing compliance manager for the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority, the state's main housing agency.

"One of the failings we have in this community," Hill said, "is we never had proper control over development that prevented properties from becoming nuisance properties."

Issuing criminal citations didn't always work: Hill said their net effect was like issuing a "traffic ticket" that required the town to reach a standard of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt," which wasn't easy to do.

Hill said Town Commissioner Filandro R. Anaya came up with the idea to pass an ordinance allowing for the use of the cannabis excise tax revenue that comes to local municipalities under the Cannabis Regulation Act.

The process works like this: the town identifies the property and posts an abatement notice, giving the owners 10 days to address the issue. If that goes nowhere, Edgewood holds a civil hearing in which an examiner reviews the complaint and determines whether to give the owner more time to deal with the issue or allow the town to move in with abatement procedures.

Abatement can include the removal or destruction of whatever is causing the nuisance — including the house itself.

The town is not sidestepping owners, Hill said, but rather, drawing them into a partnership of sorts in which the owner agrees Edgewood can remove the offending buildings.

The town uses the existing excise tax money to do the job, and then the owner agrees to write a check for the cost of the abatement. In essence, officials say, the municipality breaks even.

Property owners often realize the buildings are a nuisance and want to tear them down but haven't looked into the process or figured out how to do it. Hill added some owners also realize the value of the property will increase if the blight is removed.

"People can see the potential of what this property is worth so it becomes marketable," he said, noting owners have another incentive: They can avoid having the town begin a foreclosure process.

Nuisance properties in Edgewood are often long abandoned and now vacant, like the one on the hill behind one of the town's many churches. A stray license plate — sitting near a boat in the middle of a yard — had a registration tag dating to 2005. That may be the last time someone actually lived at the property, Hill said.

Properties deemed nuisances are more than just aesthetic problems — they can become temporary homes for squatters, people using drugs or even arsonists, said Town Commissioner Jerry Powers.

"It degrades the character of the community," Powers said as he watched two contractors clean the last of the debris from the recent razing of one of the derelict houses in town.

Santa Fe has had its share of tussles with similar properties, including one on the 2700 block of Alamosa Drive that became the focus of frustration for neighbors. The city has its own procedures when it comes to dealing with such nuisance properties, according to an email from city spokesman Bernie Toon. If a nuisance property racks up six reported incidents in six months, the city sends the owner a letter to say it will initiate an investigation.

If the nuisance continues, the city issues a notice of violation and starts an abatement process, though the owner has additional venues to forestall that by coming up with a plan to address the problem. Ultimately, the city can move in to deal with the problem at the expense of the owner, Toon wrote.

As of last week, Santa Fe has 16 properties targeted for possible or active abatement actions. The Alamosa property, the subject of several stories in The New Mexican in recent years, has been successfully abated and is pending new ownership, said Isabella Sharpe, constituent services manager for the city.

In Edgewood, Powers said he found it to be a "neat idea" to use the cannabis excise money to "fix the problem."

Charlie Moore, a spokesman for the state Taxation and Revenue Department, said in an interview municipalities can use the cannabis excise tax funds "as they see fit." He said he had not heard of any other local governments using the tax money in this way.

Hill said the new procedures have led to more "cordial" interactions between the town and the owners of the nuisance properties. He said owners often have moved away or inherited the place from a deceased relative and haven't dealt with the problem, especially from afar.

He said the abatement program also leaves open the possibility of a developer building more affordable housing on some of the properties.

The town is not working to evict people who may still be living in some of these neglected homes, Hill said. Rather, it's trying to work with them and Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity to temporarily relocate them into better housing while a solution is formed.

Edgewood is working on a broad grant request to the state Mortgage Finance Authority to lay out other ways to rehabilitate and replace properties in need of help, Hill said.

In the meantime, he and Powers notice neighbors living near nuisance properties responding positively to the town's initiative.

In fact, Hill said, he and the abatement crews see many of those neighbors improve their own places.

"Some see us cleaning up a property, they want to clean up their property," he said. "Some of it, I think, is fear of being next on the [abatement] list. Whatever it is, if it works, it works."