Albuquerque City Ordinances

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About the Albuquerque City Ordinances
Organization
Searching
Large Files

About the Albuquerque City Ordinances

The Albuquerque City Ordinances govern what is legal within the city limits. City ordinances govern a wide variety of topics, ranging from what hours are considered quiet hours in residential neighorboods to criminal activities to how and when private citizens may use fire hydrants.

Technet offers an easy-to-use web-based tool for searching the City Ordinances. Please see Organization for more on how the Ordinances are organized.

Organization

Ordinances consist of chapters, articles, parts, and sections. Each chapter deals with a major area: for example, chapter 14 is the zoning code, chapter 8 is the traffic code, and chapter 12 is the criminal code. Each article then deals with a narrower area within that chapter. The parts narrow further, while the section numbers are the specific regulations. When searching, you may specify as little or as much of a ordinance number as you want, from one to four numbers. (Although specifying one number will produce a large file, because it will bring up an entire chapter.)

Searching

New Mexico Technet has the revised 1994 versions available for searching. One method of searching is to use the eXcite Search engine to search the Albuquerque City Ordinances by typing in words of interest. (This method of searching uses web forms. See Using Web Forms for more detail.) Another option for accessing the Ordinances is by ordinance number. This is often useful for checking cross-references.

To search by ordinance number, simply enter the number with no dashes:

(For example enter "9 2 1 4" to jump to § 9-2-1-4 ANIMAL CONTROL CENTER; IMPOUNDING PROCEDURES.)

Also, see Using Find to Search for Information if the term you are seeking isn't on the first screen.

Large Files

Many ordinance files are large. Also, the computer generated table of contents is particularly large. Some pages contain entire chapters or articles, so don't be surprised if they take a while to load. The browser may not show the progress in the upper right corner and thus look ready to scroll down, but may still be processing the document. Additionally, in some browsers, the document may also take a long time to re-load even if the file has already been downloaded. This typically happens if you resize the window or if you go to another document and then return to the large document.

Another issue with large files is that the item you're looking for may be in the document you retrieve, but not at the top See Using Find to Search for Information for how to do this.