City clerk: Get a permit or go to court

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — You would think that giving out business permits would be an easy job.

But the job does have its moments, as Alfred Abeita has learned. He has working in the city clerk’s office since 1992, serving as city clerk since last year.

For most of the 1,400 business permits the city issues a year, it’s routine — pay your fee and receive your license.

But over the years, there have been a handful of business owners who have declared their right to operate a business without any kind of interference from the city, which includes being forced to pay $35 a year for the annual permit.

Abeita said the city gets the usual response: “You are violating my constitutional rights to free trade and commerce.”

But the city, said Abeita, has its own response: Pay or we’re going to take you to court. The city has been forced to do that in a few cases and it has always ended there.

“We have never had to shut anyone down,” he said.

City business licenses cost anywhere from $35 a year to $500 a day, but the underlying reason for each is the same — the city wants to be sure before someone sets up a shop or a cart that they know the city regulations and are agreeable to following them.

If you want to be a cart vendor, it’s going to cost you $100 a day. If you want to set up a temporary business in a permanent structure, it’s going to be $200 a day. And if you want to set up on a public right of way, it’s $500 a day.

Abeita said he hasn’t seen any of those $500-a-day permits, in part because there’s another ordinance that says the city doesn’t want businesses operating in a public right of way.

Making sure that people comply with getting the proper business permit isn’t easy, since the city clerk does not have a big enough staff to go out and patrol the streets of Gallup to see if someone has set up a temporary cart on a street corner or moved into an existing building.

“We check out advertisements in the newspaper and those on the radio,” he said.

But the office relies on the public for word that there may be someone out there trying to operate without a license.

“We depend on the public to be our eyes and ears,” he said. When a phone call comes in, he said, he will either send one of his staff to investigate or he calls the police to send an officer. If the person doesn’t have one, he will be told to get one or shut down.

The city clerk’s office also monitors nonprofit organizations that want to set up on a city road to collect donations.

The City Council has discussed this several times, with council members saying they have gotten complaints from citizens about aggressive fund raising where people would walk into the traffic, stop their car and demand a donation.

The city has taken care of this by limiting what the organization can do and requiring them to get permission from the city manager, hoping that this will cut down the number of organizations that try to raise funds in this way.

“We recently had a Christian group come from Albuquerque to raise funds this way,” he said. But the city soon began receiving phone calls from people complaining about them stopping cars.

“We had to tell them that they had to stay off the roadway and when they kept doing it, we had to shut them down,” he said.
Information: 863-1254.