Dozens of grass-roots activists wearing red shirts packed a legislative hearing room and filled the gallery of the North Carolina Senate Tuesday, awaiting a vote on the Annexation Reform Act of 2011.

The bill, making significant changes in the state’s 50-year-old annexation law, passed its first floor vote 39-8 late Tuesday. The Senate plans to take its third and final vote on the bill today. The bill will then go back to the House for concurrence and then to the governor’s desk.

The bill makes two major reforms in the state’s annexation policy. It gives those being annexed a voice in the process and provides them with “free” hookups to municipal water and sewer lines. And though reformers who have been working to change the law for 20 years have cheered the passage of House Bill 845, some lawmakers and residents of one community facing involuntary annexation questioned how loud that voice would be.

For more than a half-century, if a city wished to annex a neighborhood or individual parcels of land, property owners who did not want to be absorbed by the city had no power to block the move or to affect in any way the terms of the annexation.

H.B. 845 would give landowners the ability to fight city hall. It allows property owners to veto a proposed annexation if the owners of 60 percent of the parcels of land signed a petition opposing the annexation.

A few dozen Nash County residents targeted for annexation by the City of Rocky Mount — many of them senior citizens — spent the day in Raleigh waiting to hear the outcome of the bill. They came by bus. After the bill passed a Senate committee hearing at 2 p.m., the group voted to stay in Raleigh until the full Senate voted on the bill, which they were told might not happen until midnight.

“I was so excited I couldn’t sleep last night,” said the group’s leader Charlene Moore.

Moore, a resident of a rural Nash County community called Oak Level, said she and her neighbors had been fighting for annexation reform in North Carolina for years.

“We will be so glad when we can retire,” she laughed.

Moore said she was sure that 100 percent of the residents of Oak Level would sign the petitions and overturn Rocky Mount’s annexation.

Text change

Still, not all reform activists were satisfied fully with the bill. In the first two editions of H.B. 845, the petition to reject an annexation had to be signed by 60 percent of the property owners.

A proposed committee substitute to the bill, adopted May 11, altered that language to say that the owners of 60 percent of the parcels had to sign petitions before an annexation could be rejected.

Annexation reformer and Davidson County resident Keith Bost said the change is subtle but significant, especially for his golf course community, Sapona, which sits between the City of Lexington and land planned for a high-density housing development.

According to city emails, a developer wishing to build high-density housing just beyond Sapona requested to be annexed “involuntarily,” along with Sapona, by Lexington. The developer wanted a sewer line built from the city limits to his development. Had he requested to be annexed “voluntarily,” he would have been required to pay for the sewer line.

The “forcible” annexation of the new housing development would let city taxpayers build the trunk line to his property. And the forcible annexation of Sapona would give the city a direct route —through the middle of the community’s golf course — to the new housing development.

With the new text change in the bill, a developer with a large undeveloped piece of land that has been divided into separate residential parcels could have hundreds of petition votes, one for each parcel. That means a single developer could outvote individual homeowners. In Sapona’s case, the residents could be outvoted, allowing a city-initiated annexation to proceed.

Why the change? Carolina Journal learned that the language was added to provide clarity. Many undeveloped or partially developed tracts of land have multiple owners — including investors, developers, and lenders. In earlier versions of H.B. 845, it was not certain who would have standing to protest a proposed annexation. Since parcels of land must have clear legal title, any ambiguity over ownership would be settled.

A disincentive to involuntary annexation would remain, of course, as city taxpayers would have to pay for any infrastructure running to the annexed properties, and the cost of those additions could not be passed on to the new city residents.

Local bill?

Initially, H.B. 845 didn’t give Nash County’s Moore — or others whose annexations were under way — much hope. The bill has no effect on communities with annexation ordinances already adopted. But a last-minute transformation of House Bill 56 could give Oak Level and dozens of other already annexed communities an opportunity for a retroactive petition vote.

H.B. 56 originated as a repeal of Rocky Mount’s recent annexation, but was gutted and turned into an omnibus bill that suspends the annexation ordinances of nine cities around the state, giving those facing annexation 90 days to reject the ordinance by petition. The bill was ushered through the Senate Finance Committee yesterday and slipped onto the Senate calendar for this morning.

In addition to Rocky Mount, the bill suspends adopted annexation ordinances in Kinston, Lexington, Wilmington, Asheville, Marvin, Southport, and Ayden, until the residents have had a vote, and gives Goldsboro residents a chance to repeal an already effective annexation ordinance by petition.

H.B. 56 is scheduled for a preliminary vote on the Senate floor today, and should be up for a final vote shortly after that. If it passes the Senate, it will have to go back to the House for concurrence.

Farms

The Senate Finance Committee also passed another annexation reform yesterday — House Bill 168 — which exempts farms from involuntary annexation, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and zoning by cities. The bill is on today’s Senate calendar.

Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.