Council Returns Garage Sale Permit Fee Back to Original Price

After mistakenly raising the fee cost for garage sale permits, council voted to return the price back to $5.

After previously clarifying that the council’s approval of an ordinance that included vendor permit fee increases mistakenly passed an increase in garage sale permit fees from $5 to $25, council members voted unanimously to correct this error during the regular city council meeting held on November 19, 2024. 

The portion of the ordinance addressing garage sale permit fees was brought back before council for a vote. City Manager Shawna Burkhart stated, “These errors were found as city staff erroneously posted some information that actually was approved by city council,” Burkhart clarified further. “We stumbled over that as we were trying to correct ourselves so we’re bringing those changes back to you so that we can appropriately adopt what the city council has articulated, specifically for garage sale vendor permits.” 

Mayor Al Arreola asked Operations and Compliance Auditor, Scot Carcasi to go over the ordinance and vendor permit fees and the corrections before a vote was taken. “As Miss Burkhart stated, we came across this and obviously that wasn’t the intention of council so we brought this back,” Carcasi began. “So you’ll see in section 20-22 the fees were raised to $100 for an individual license but we returned it back to $50.” “Then the next change you’ll see is in section 20-30 number 4, there was some conflicting language so we put it to 12 days or less, about one a month, and we reduced the garage sale permit fee from the amount of $25 to $5, we made those changes to meet council’s intent.” 

Mayor Arreola and Councilperson Carmen Gutierrez raised questions about fees surrounding signs left around the city. “I think we had talked about possibly, when we were discussing the $25 increase to leave it at $5 and charge $25 to those individuals who are littering and leaving their signs out,” Councilperson Gutierrez said. “There was some discussion about fining them since the city employees ending up having to pick them up or they blow away and litter our beautiful city.” 

Carcasi told council that he did not include a section for that in the changes made to the ordinance, stating that he was more concerned with reducing the fees and remedying the errors previously found but added that those could be added if that is the council’s intent. 

When the question was raised whether to vote on the current changes to vendor fees or table this and bring it back once Councilperson Gutierrez’ suggestions were added, Councilperson Quinones countered, “I think we should just pass this to correct it because I think when we were discussing all that we had scrapped all that section of the fee schedule to do some more homework and get feedback so I think if you’re gonna make one adjustment we should make several if we’re gonna look at that other part of the fee schedule and just correct this for now.” 

“I think the $5 for garage sale permits was the issue so everything else can be brought back later,” Mayor Arreola stated with City Manager Burkhart suggesting that those updates could be made and brought back in the future and council could just vote on the garage sale permit fees for the time being to which council agreed. 

Mayor Arreola asked for Carcasi to look into the ordinance addressing political signs being left up longer than the allotted 30 days after the election for future review as well to which Carcasi replied that Neighborhood Services was in contact with those named on the signs in regards to having them taken down. 

A motion was made by Councilperson Gutierrez to pass the garage sale permit fee back from $25 to $5, seconded by Councilperson Quinones with all members voting in favor to pass the motion and correct the fees.