This recent Chron story about the county cracking down on auto salvage yards raised a couple of interesting points.
The county long has been able to come after the yards for spills and drainage problems. This year Commissioners Court gave the county attorney the power to enforce state anti-nuisance rules that allow government lawyers to target yards not just for how they operate, but where.
Any yard that keeps cars within 300 feet of a home or church or within 50 feet of a road will be denied a county permit. The yard owners also must maintain fences and keep salvaged vehicles inside them. In April, the county attorney’s office filed its first lawsuit against a yard it alleges has violated those rules. The office is preparing three more suits.
“In an unzoned city and, of course, unzoned county, a salvage yard, if not properly run, can ruin your neighborhood,” said Terry O’Rourke, first assistant county attorney. “We want salvage yards. We just don’t want them to ruin the quality of life for the people they’re around.”
The county formed a task force in recent years in response to complaints from residents and civic associations in the Aldine area, said Rock Owens, an assistant county attorney who specializes in environmental cases. Many yards were setting up shop in Aldine and other areas just outside the Houston city limits after the city had tightened its regulations on junkyards.
Stuff like this, and the efforts in recent years to ban smoking in most indoor establishments, show the limits to government based on arbitrarily-drawn boundaries. The city cracks down on these nuisances, so they move to unincorporated Harris County. If the county succeeds in getting tough on them, odds are they’ll move to Montgomery or Liberty or Galveston or some other neighboring county. There’s plenty of good reasons why one state may want to do certain things differently than another, or why one city may want to do certain things differently than another, but I can’t think of a good reason for such a piecemeal approach to problems like this. In some cases, you have an entity located in one place that’s causing problems for residents of another but is legally out of their reach – think polluters, for one prime example. Some things require a regional approach, but we just don’t have that capability for the most part. This is one result of that.
The new rules and lawsuits amount to a backdoor way of imposing zoning on a single industry, said salvage yard owner Cameron Tavakoli.
He predicted the crackdown will be a job-killer.
If successful, the county’s efforts likely will result in a reduction of auto salvage yard-related employment. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, of course. Certainly, Harris County thinks the benefits it will get from things like better land use and higher property values will outweigh whatever short-term loss of jobs there may be. I’m inclined to agree with them on this.