By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Close to 20 bills have been submitted in the N.C. General Assembly to change North Carolina’s 50-year annexation law.
But how much change will be enough for opponents who view forced municipal annexations as morally and constitutionally wrong?
“Tweaking is not an option,” says Mark Davis, president of the Good Neighbors of Rowan County, which formed last year to fight a Salisbury annexation attempt.
“We need to change the laws.”
Rowan County’s legislation delegation of Reps. Lorene Coates and Fred Steen and Sen. Andrew Brock have supported bills that, for lack of a better description, are on the far side of tweaking.
For the seventh time, Brock has introduced a bill that would take North Carolina back to the pre-1959 law and allow the citizens targeted for annexation to vote the question up or down.
“The only bill that’s older is to end capital punishment in North Carolina,” says Brock, a Republican whose district includes Rowan and Davie counties. “… Cities feel like they have to grow in size to grow economically. I personally don’t think that’s the case.”
Brock says annexation reform has become an issue in which Democrats and Republicans are finding common ground.
“It’s almost property owners against the cities,” Brock says of the real lines being drawn.
Coates, a Democrat, and Steen, a Republican, have affixed their names to many of the same bills, all of which support positions taken by opponents of involuntary annexations.
Steen often has been one of the primary sponsors, along with Reps. Nelson Dollar, R-Wake; Bruce Goforth, D-Buncombe; and Larry Brown, R-Forsyth.
Coates and Steen support House bills that would give people being proposed for annexation the right to vote the question up or down ó something which municipal officials fear would effectively kill the growth of cities in North Carolina.
The local legislators also endorse a moratorium on involuntary annexations until the laws change and, more specifically, have introduced a local bill that would prohibit any Rowan County municipality from trying to involuntarily annex until at least June 30, 2010.
Steen, Coates and Brock resist making bold predictions that the annexation law will substantially change.
“It’s really hard to gauge at this point in time,” Steen said. “… You have to look at the leadership. What is the leadership willing to do?”
Brock worries the state budget crisis will push the annexation issue aside. Committee meetings are being canceled “just to deal with the budget, and they want to get out of there by June,” Brock says.
Legislators agree that the real hurdle to any significant change will come in the Senate, where Sen. Tony Rand, D-Fayettevile, is the majority leader.
“Rand likes the annexation laws the way they are,” Brock says. “… I think there will be changes to the law. How substantial, I don’t know.”
Coates says she thinks significant annexation legislation can pass the House, but not the Senate.
One of the changes that really needs to occur, she says, is prohibiting cities from using the forced annexation statutes without providing services in a reasonable time. Coates claims some municipalities annex areas and 10 years later still have not provided water and sewer services.
“That’s just not right,” she says.
Coates says she hates that her stand on annexation has put her at odds with the city of Salisbury.
“I thought they were wrong when they went out N.C. 150 and tried to annex,” Coates says. “I thought they were too ambitious.
“I try to support the city as much as I can, but I have to look out for the county, too. I vote my conscience regardless.”
Legislators have submitted what amounts to dueling versions of annexation bills.
The two drawing the most attention are Rand’s Senate Bill 472 (also introduced as House Bill 727) and House Bill 645 (also introduced as Senate Bill 494). They represent opposite sides of the issue.
The Fair Annexation Coalition has dubbed House Bill 645 and its Senate companion bill as “the gold standard in annexation bills.”
The N.C. League of Municipalities favors Senate Bill 472 and its companion. A League press release said the bills it supports “make substantial changes to North Carolina’s annexation statutes in several areas.”
The Rand legislation is based on a 20-point proposal the league made to the Joint Senate and House Study Commission on Municipal Annexation last December.
The League says the changes would give citizens more time to request individual water and sewer extensions to their properties; provide more information about the process; allow more time to challenge annexations; require more detailed financial information to help ensure the timely delivery of water and sewer; require municipalities to provide at least two of four major services (police, fire, garbage collection and street maintenance) to annex; prohibit narrow strips of land as shoestring connections to a municipality; and create a new category of citizen-requested annexations for low-wealth areas.
Steen, Dollar, Goforth and Brown are primary sponsors for House Bill 645, titled “Annexation / Meaningful Services and Oversight.”
This legislation would require a county public hearing and a vote, if 15 percent of the qualified voters in an annexation area sign a petition or if objections are raised at the public hearing.
The annexation could only proceed if a majority of the residents voted for it.
In addition, the legislation would require county approval of a municipal annexation and would eliminate differences in the current law between small and large cities.
House Bill 645 also would require the installation of all water and sewer lines, not just mains. Cities would be given three years, instead of two, to install this total water-sewer infrastructure.
It would require a third (not the current eighth) of the annexation area to be contiguous with a municipality. The bill says a proposed annexation also must be in need of “meaningful urban services.”
In that regard, the legislation reads, an “area in need of municipal services shall mean an area in which a majority of property owners have water service, sewer or septic service, police protection or fire protection that is inadequate and clearly poses a threat to the health and safety of the area, and the property owners could not reasonably address the threat themselves through private or public means.”
Cities would not be allowed to contract with county sheriff departments to cover annexation areas. Contracts for rural fire departments to cover annexation areas would only be valid until water lines were completed.
The city could not contract with a private firm for garbage collection, unless that firm already served the municipality.
The House bill favored by the most vocal annexation opponents also spells out provisions for “deannexation” and gives a longer time frame to appeal annexation to Superior Court.
In the Senate, the competing bills have been referred to the Committee on State and Local Government.
Davis, the president of Good Neighbors of Rowan County and a board member with the Fair Annexation Coalition, said the citizen organizations have made it clear they aren’t going away if legislators merely “tweak the law.”
Again, he says, tweaking is not an option.