Governing Body revisits updated noise ordinance

The City of Vision is growing fast, which has some city leaders concerned about the growing noise and growing noise complaints that come with growth.

Rio Rancho currently has a very broad and vague noise ordinance that doesn’t set specific limits as to what decibel levels are too loud.

The city has proposed an updated ordinance that would change that by using a decibel measuring system, setting acceptable levels for noise both day and night. The ordinance would also set different sound rules depending on the area such as residential versus commercial and mixed-use areas.

The Rio Rancho Governing Body held a work session April 1 to discuss changes to the proposed updated ordinance that was read at the March 14 meeting.

At that meeting, city councilors postponed a vote to update the city’s current noise ordinance until the April 11 meeting.

From Jan. 1, 2022, through Dec. 31, 2023, the Rio Rancho Police Department received 1,323 calls for service related to noise complaints, and just seven citations were issued for municipal court.

Rio Rancho Deputy City Manager Peter Wells said the current noise ordinance does not define what exactly a noise violation is. The City’s Unreasonable Noise Ordinance has elements which are subjective and undefined. Currently, he said, any noise that annoys or disturbs someone could constitute a violation of the law, with a penalty enforced.

“It essentially boils down to, if any noise disturbs someone, that can constitute a call to our police department. And then an officer’s going to have to make a judgment call with no clear data or standard threshold to decide whether or not they feel that is unreasonable, and it’s annoying and disturbing,” Wells said. “So I will tell you that our language is very old. It is cookie-cutter language that a lot of communities adopted for original ordinances or charters and whatnot. But as communities get larger, and they have more issues, they have to go to a more scientific, defined approach, and I think that’s where Rio Rancho is.”

After the vote was postponed on March 14, the city of Rio Rancho opened a suggestion portal to get feedback from citizens on the proposed updated ordinance. Those suggestions were brought to the Governing Body on April 1.

The hour-long work session on April 1 was Round 3 of the governing body andcity staff collaborating to hammer out the specific details of the updated ordinance. The conversation centered around the need to revise the noise ordinance in the city to address concerns from both residential and commercial properties.

Wells, who spent more than an hour answering questions at the March 14 meeting about the ordinance, gave a presentation to the city council and Mayor Gregg Hull comparing Rio Rancho’s ordinance rules with those of other New Mexico communities.

Wells’ presentation showed the different hours of enforcement, decibel level limits and measurement methods in Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Farmington and Bernalillo County.

“I thought it was important based on the previous discussion for you to see what the other communities that are our size in the region or a little bit smaller use. You can see there's five examples and there are five different ways,” Wells said. “I’m not going to advocate for which one is better than the other. It's just I wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page in terms of what we propose and what other communities are doing. As you can see, we are not an outlier and we are not as restrictive as some other communities. So using these five other comparisons, we wanted to show you, the governing body, what we use and where our proposal falls within the other communities, and it is right in line with these other places.”

If the updated ordinance is approved, the city of Rio Rancho would observe daytime hours of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and nighttime hours of 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. The hours would be different on weekends. The decibel level limits would be:

• Residential daytime: 55 dB Nighttime-50 dB

• Residential nighttime: 50 dB

• Industrial and manufacturing daytime: 75 dB

• Industrial and manufacturing nighttime: 70 dB

• Non-residential and commercial daytime: 65 dB

• Non-residential and commercial nighttime: 60 dB

Those numbers are directly in line with Albuquerque’s and Santa Fe’s limits and similar to Farmington and Bernalillo County.

The measuring methods of other communities are more extensive, with Albuquerque actually requiring a police officer to measure the noise level from inside of the complainant's residence.

“I don't support police officers having to go inside anybody’s house,” Hull said. “That's a non-starter for me. Going into a house and measuring with the window open, that's going to be hard.”

The measuring method proposed by Wells and city staff is the noise will be measured by a police officer from the source's property Line. The noise must be above the decibel limit for a 10-minute period.

Wells also provided other options for measuring, which the governing body can mull over before possibly adding to the updated ordinance at the April 11 meeting.

Each councilor and Hull applauded Wells, City Manager Matt Geisel and city staff for their work on the project and stressed the importance of doing something to improve the current, vague noise ordinance.

“Thank you for this presentation and thank you very much for the citizen feedback. I think this is actually really helpful,” District 5 Councilor Karissa Culbreath said. “It really, truly points to the fact that when we're looking at this noise ordinance, all of us who are in this community, whether we are residents, businesses or manufacturing, we're all neighbors. I think a lot of the comments also point back to the fact that residents should be good neighbors to each other, but also businesses are neighbors to residents and are neighbors to each other.”