With the end of the legislative session, the debate over forced annexation sleeps at the General Assembly. But it marches onward outside of Raleigh.
In Nash County, a cluster of 13 subdivisions is fighting to keep from being absorbed by the city of Rocky Mount. Charlene Moore, the acting chair of Oak Level Communities Against Forced Annexation, says her organization has tried everything from incorporation to a lawsuit to head off the city’s encroachment.
“What they’re doing is wrong,” she said. “I don’t care what you call it. Forced annexation is wrong.”
The city’s annexation plan includes 1,732 acres divided among five separate areas. The largest, 1,383 acres encompassing 667 homes and about 1,700 residents, extends from Interstate 95 corridor westward to the edge of Nashville, just crossing U.S. Highway 64 on the north.
“All it is is a tax grab,” Moore said. The mostly residential property in the area has a tax valuation of more than $96 million. She said the move would increase residents’ property tax by 53 percent; the city expects to collect $714,904 in property tax alone if the annexation goes through.
Residents say their proposed annexation offers little in return. Homes in the area had to put in wells and septic systems to meet occupancy requirements for the county, Moore said — “some of them less than three months ago” — and they are satisfied with the volunteer fire department they support and their own efforts cleaning and lighting the subdivision streets.
If Oak Level becomes part of Rocky Mount, she said, all their financial support for the now-rural community would be funneled to the city. Services that remain for their unincorporated neighbors, such as the volunteer fire department, would be severely impacted. “Where will they be then?” she asked.
The battle over Oak Level is the latest pitting city governments hungry for new tax revenues against residents and business owners situated outside municipal boundaries. Grass-roots pressure from local and statewide property-rights groups pushed legislators to consider changing the annexation process. But the only measure to emerge from the General Assembly, House Bill 524, passed in July, is a “compromise” that pleases neither property owners nor city officials.
Annexation reform got a boost from the N.C. Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in Nolan v. Village of Marvin. Darren Bakst, the legal and regulatory policy analyst for the John Locke Foundation, said the decision defined a clear expectation that involuntary annexations must provide meaningful services to the annexed property. He said cities and towns have stretched that to the limit.
“Cities will annex areas with no need of services,” he said, “as if providing a single new police officer when the area already had excellent police services” would satisfy the Nolan requirements.
“H.B. 524,” Bakst said, “did more harm than good. It doesn’t do anything toward reform.”
Genuine reform, he said, would ensure that meaningful services are provided, a third party — ideally the county commission — has oversight of the proposed annexation, and residents of the area have a vote in the matter.
“The vote provision in H.B. 524 is a joke,” Bakst said. Landowners’ groups want to subject any attempt by a city to annex property forcibly to a vote by the people being annexed. H.B. 524 allows a vote, but the process would make it difficult if not impossible for residents who don’t want to be annexed from blocking the move.
Under the bill, those objecting to a proposed annexation could call for a referendum. But to get it on the ballot, they would have to collect signatures from 15 percent of the residents in both the area being annexed and the city requesting the annexation. Voters from the entire area would then vote on the proposal.
“The voting provision is unfair to citizens in the annexed area,” said Allison Fowler, legislative director for the N.C. State Grange. “They have to convince urban voters to oppose the annexation? To say there’s a vote in this bill is disingenuous.”
Fowler said the Grange would back a reform bill “to put power in the people’s hands,” but this isn’t it.
On the other hand, the N.C. League of Municipalities is “disappointed” that the voting procedure was included in the bill at all. The measure was added in committee and defied efforts to remove it before passage in the House.
The League’s director of public affairs, Margot Christensen, pointed to an Aug.14 legislative bulletin stating, “The addition of the referendum provision made the bill unfair and unworkable, setting a path that would effectively eliminate the use of annexation as a tool to manage growth and provide urban services in an orderly manner.”
Despite the League’s warning, Bakst is not optimistic about the eventual fate of the bill. “The hope is that somehow the bill will be fixed [in 2010], but the North Carolina Senate is notoriously unhelpful” on property rights issues, he said.
Oak Level’s Charlene Moore said her group took as many as 30 people to the General Assembly for every meeting that addressed annexation. “We went on every trip to Raleigh we could go,” she said. “One week we went four times when they kept postponing the meeting.”
Like Bakst, she said the present bill wouldn’t fix anything.
“There is absolutely nothing in it that will help anyone at all,” Moore said. She is looking forward to an October court date for her organization’s lawsuit against Rocky Mount.
Hal Young is a contributor to Carolina Journal.