By William Morris

Eddy County in southeast New Mexico (www.co.eddy.nm.us) is a rural community that includes Carlsbad and the smaller communities of Artesia, Hope, and Loving. The county is also a local government that does not have zoning ordinances. This area is in the grips of the oil boom occurring within the Permian Basin, which is creating problematic situations for residents.

The establishment of zoning for Eddy County has been tried before, and it completely failed. The state of New Mexico also has a provision for creating extra territorial zoning (ETZ) areas around local governments.

An ETZ area is regulated by a joint planning commission made up of members from both the municipality and county; it can use whatever zoning system the two parties agree upon. Eddy County attempted to create an ETZ with Carlsbad, but it also failed miserably.

A Taboo Topic

The concept of zoning is considered akin to the “devil’s own work” to a lot of residents. Just mentioning the word “zoning” can actually upset some folks.

At the same time, because of the crush of activities resulting from the oil boom, residents began to complain about the impact on their quality of life. Oilfield service companies have been arriving on a daily basis from outside the area and are buying almost any parcel of land to set up their operations.

These operations can include truck yards, pipe and equipment yards, chemical storage areas, and automotive repair on heavy trucks. Many of the most desired parcels for purchase are usually located within formally residential areas since they are flat, usually cleared, and have access to some sort of road. Eddy County residents have complained that these companies cause noise, vibrations, dust, and just a sense of general chaos that never existed on that road before.

The normal response on the part of others—usually city residents where zoning is already established—is usually something like, “Well, get the zoning in place!”

Then people from the other side become upset and leave, unsatisfied about the situation. Residents do not like what is happening to their world but reject the traditional zoning solution to addressing these situations. I did not find that this was satisfactory for me either.

I came up with the following solution.

Review the complaints. What I found was that there was concurrence on the same five basic problems countywide. Regardless of where I spoke with residents, complaints nearly always fell into one or more of the following five categories.

• Trucking companies locating in predominantly residential areas, overnight and long-term parking of vehicles, and automotive repair (heavy vehicle).
• Temporary workforce housing (i.e., “man camps”).
• Commercial uses locating in residential areas, primarily equipment laydown yards.
• Liquid waste noncompliance.
• Mobile home placement and relocation.

Create a series of discrete, single-issue ordinances. This phase calls for developing and adopting a series of closely defined regulations concerning specific issues that address the five problem areas. That way, if a particular ordinance gets hung up for whatever reason, the other ordinances can still proceed through the adoption process.

Combine single-issue ordinances, at a later date, into a single land development code. This step will call for combining all of the various proposed, as well as the several existing, land-use ordinances into a single document. This document will be based on situations that have been approved for regulation by the board of county commissioners and not through the imposition of zoning on a community that has a clear, visceral distaste for it.

Overall, Eddy County will be striving to tackle some extremely important issues identified by residents using these issues as the basis for a regulatory framework also allows staff to deal with a series of smaller, manageable policy issues rather than attempt to create an entire new zoning code for a community that did not want one.

There are already drafts of the liquid waste and mobile home placement ordinances. The temporary workforce housing ordinance is not far behind. A slower, piecemeal approach to addressing land-use problems created by the oil boom is proving itself to be a successful strategy that avoids the incendiary issue of a zoning code.