Short answer. Yes. Article 2169 makes you liable for the expenses when the government undertakes necessary work on your property after you failed to comply with health or safety regulations, even if you objected to the government doing the work. The obligation to pay follows from your own initial non-compliance.
What the law says
When the government, upon the failure of any person to comply with health or safety regulations concerning property, undertakes to do the necessary work, even over his objection, he shall be liable to pay the expenses.
Civil Code, Article 2169 — Government Work Done at the Owner's Expense. Read the full provision →
Your non-compliance is what triggers this liability
Article 2169 is built on a specific sequence of events: a property owner fails to comply with health or safety regulations, and the government then steps in to do the work that compliance would have required. When the government, upon the failure of any person to comply with health or safety regulations concerning property, undertakes to do the necessary work, even over his objection, he shall be liable to pay the expenses. Because you did not carry out the sanitation work yourself, the government's intervention was a direct response to that failure, and the statute places the cost back on you as a result.
Your objection does not block your obligation to pay
The article deals head-on with a scenario many property owners assume protects them: objecting when the government moves to do the work. It does not. The phrase even over his objection makes clear that voicing disagreement, or even actively opposing the government's entry to do the work, does not exempt you from paying afterward. Once the government has legitimately determined that the work was necessary under health or safety regulations, your objection affects whether the work happens, not who eventually bears its cost.
The work has to be the necessary work, not just any expense
The obligation to pay is tied to the government undertaking the necessary work — work that was actually required to bring the property into compliance with the health or safety regulation you had failed to satisfy. This ties your liability to the specific violation and the specific remedial work it justified, rather than to anything the government might choose to do on your property under a broader banner of general improvement or unrelated projects.
What this means for you
If the local government's sanitation work genuinely addressed a health regulation you had not complied with, Article 2169 places the resulting expenses on you as the property owner, regardless of whether you agreed with the government's decision to proceed. The practical step worth taking is confirming that the amount billed actually reflects the necessary work performed to address the specific violation, since the article ties your liability to that connection rather than authorizing open-ended charges.