Las Cruces, NM Public Health Rules: Rodent Control (2026)

Section 25-5, Unsanitary premises, gives the utilities director or a designee the authority to decide when accumulated solid waste on or around a property has crossed the line into a vector or odor problem. The trigger is not a fixed volume of trash; it is the director's determination that the waste emits odors or serves as a feeding or breeding place for flies, mosquitoes, insects, or rodents and is unsanitary or injurious to public health. Once that determination is made, the property owner or occupant is in violation regardless of intent.

Subsection (b) gives the city two enforcement paths that can run together: it can invoke the nuisance abatement procedure in Chapter 18 and order the violator to clean up the property, or it can send its own crews to remedy the condition directly. When the city performs the abatement itself, Sec. 25-5(b) authorizes billing the property owner for the full cost of the cleanup, which is collected the same way other solid waste charges are billed. This section sits alongside Sec. 25-4 (Accumulation of solid waste), which separately bars letting waste or recyclable material pile up on your property or adjoining city property outside the rules of the applicable health codes, and Sec.

25-6, which bars sweeping, placing, or throwing waste onto public or private property. Together these sections give code enforcement and the utilities department the tools to force cleanup of a yard that is breeding rodents or insects before it becomes a neighborhood-wide problem.