City defines garage sales in revised ordinance 1333

Area News Editor

news1@ulyssesnews.com

A new ordinance passed unanimously without fanfare at the July 10 city council meeting. Ordinance 1333 defines what is considered a garage sale in the city of Ulysses after the issue was discussed at length at the two April council meetings when the city received multiple complaints about what was basically a retail business disguised as a garage sale.

“We discussed it at length a while back and tabled it for today,” said city administrator Luke Grimes. “Basically it’s just going to define what garage sales mean in the city of Ulysses so that we can prevent people from running retail businesses out of their homes.”

Back in April, the city heard from Enrique Solano and Economic Development Director Bob Dale. Solano wanted to open a second-hand store in Ulysses but was waiting to sell his home in Hutchinson before fully committing to Ulysses, so he was operating what he called a garage sale but the city defined as a retail business.

“It wasn’t by any means intentional to try and defy anything or to skip past any rules,” Dale said on April 24.

The council decided at that time to give Solano three months, which was the July 10 meeting. The council noted that Solano was no longer setting up at the location, and has moved to a legal zone in which to do business.

The council removed two sections of the ordinance which regulated how many days and how many times someone could have a yard sale, it was just trying to prevent someone from running a retail business out of their home and calling it a yard sale.

“I drove by and it looks like he’s not doing this anymore, that originally kind of brought this up,” said council member Caleb Woods. “To me, we already have stuff in place that covers it. To me, we should have done our job in the first place and shouldn’t have let that go for a year. Why put another ordinance in place when we already have something in place to stop this stuff anyways?”

Councilman Mark Diaz said the city needs to make sure the ordinance in place stays in place and is enforced.

“Either way, we’ve got to enforce it,” Woods said.

Section 5 of the ordinance addresses garage sale signs on the right-of-way and utility poles.

“We have laws against it now, this is just more clearly laid-out, and a more severe penalty for doing it,” Grimes said, adding that it gives the police the ability to prosecute if people are “doing it all the time.”

A motion was made to approve the ordinance, removing Sections 2 and 3 and amend Section 5 to include garage sale signs.

•Several people attended the meeting expecting discussion on the chicken ordinance, but the city will take that up on July 24 as previously reported on the front page of the Ulysses News, as well as on both the News and city social media pages.