Thanks to my duties as transportation manager for Hood boys summer camps, there’s no fresh DJ today. But I did run across a piece from a couple of years ago that speaks to a topical issue in the General Assembly. Back on the morrow.

RALEIGH – Among my friends, I am known as notoriously unskilled and unlucky when it comes to mechanical contrivances.

The one and only time I bought a brand-new car, the lemon died on the way home from the dealership. It sent out a replacement car, which also died. More recently, I bought a lawnmower, used it precisely thrice, and then had several different things go wrong to keep it from starting. And back in college, I ran over myself with my own car.

Yes, you do want to hear that story. And no, I’m not going to tell you.

But even I – chairman of Incompetent Handymen of America, Local 24601 – know better than to try to turn a flathead screw with a Phillips screwdriver. I think that is an appropriate analogy for the state’s misguided policy of “solving” problem of local finance by allowing cities to annex whomever they want, whenever they want.

There aren’t very many states in the union more committed to involuntary annexation than North Carolina is. It’s not as if the policy enjoys broad public support – there have been local fights about the issue recently in communities from Asheville to Fayetteville to Wilmington, and it’s obvious that public sentiment is against municipal land-grabbing. The commitment comes from public officials, elected and appointed, local and in Raleigh. They are firmly convinced that annexation keeps cities “healthy” and “balanced.” And because of the dynamics of municipal elections – you can’t vote until you’ve already been annexed, while most voters have other issues on their minds – the land-grabbing doesn’t necessarily end political careers.

Activists rallied in the state capital the other day in favor of several bills to reform annexation, including one requiring a referendum. These members of Stop NC Annexation protested at the same time that their lobbying nemesis, the NC League of Municipalities, met in Raleigh to press their case on annexation and other issues. Strong passions were evident on both sides.

Municipal officials pose a legitimate question: if people who live outside the city limits consume services paid for by property taxes, aren’t they getting an unfair subsidy? Their answer – “yes, that’s why we need annexation!” – is unsatisfactory, however.

For one thing, non-residents do help pay property taxes, and thus support city services, if they work, shop, or recreate at taxable businesses in the city. Taxes on commercial property are partially shouldered by workers and consumers, whether they realize it or not. In a rough sense, then, non-residents implicitly pay taxes roughly in proportion to how much time and money they spend in town.

Obviously, city residents pay more tax because they get hit at work, at the store, and at home. But then again, they receive a higher level of service (police and fire, street access to their homes, etc.) The biggest problem, it seems to me, involves services such as parks and recreation, community centers, or performing-arts venues where specific individuals benefit regardless of where they live and pay property taxes. If these services, conducted on non-taxable land, are provided at little or no cost to the user, the potential does exist for non-residents to impose service costs on the community without contributing sufficient taxes to cover them.

Here’s where the Phillip screwdriver comes in, though. Rather than coerce neighborhoods into the city’s tax base, which forces many people to pay taxes for services they will never use, municipal officials should charge appropriate user fees. In the first place, governments were not instituted among mankind to host concerts or run sports leagues. If they are going to be in those businesses, the beneficiaries should, as much as possible, offset the cost (and even a system for exempting some users, such as poor children, would still reduce the subsidy problem if the exemption was predicated on residency).

If you think about it, plenty of residents don’t use these services, either, yet get forced to pay for them through property taxation. The problem isn’t really the extent of municipal boundaries. It’s a flawed system for determining government priorities and allocating the resulting costs.

Naturally, many advocates of forced annexation won’t pick the right tool for this job, because getting rid of cross-subsidies isn’t their goal. They see annexation as a means of income redistribution, or social engineering, or at least a handy way to score some cash. But for those fair-minded people who just want to make rational tax policy, take my advice and reach for that flathead screwdriver marked “user fee.”

And if you feel like returning the favor sometime, please refer me to a good lawnmower mechanic.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.