Annexation bill only a political ploy
State Rep. Hugh Holliman has introduced a bill to try and salvage his chances for re-election. Holliman’s bill would call for a combined vote on annexations, with the city residents and the annexation victims voting. It is ridiculous for several reasons.
First, city residents are not being annexed. Why should they have a vote? If they are opposed to annexation, they need to let their city councils know.
Second, the so-called “vote” Holliman proposes would require 15 percent signatures (of annexation victims and city residents) be collected before the referendum would be held, and the required signatures could only be collected after the resolution of intent was announced and then presented to the city council no less than 10 days after the public hearing.
In short, even a smaller city like Goldsboro would have to get around 4,000 in as little as 69 days! Impossible. The larger the city, the more impossible it becomes.
This would also result in cities spending taxpayer dollars to promote the annexation the way they do bond issues. The lies will become more rampant, the deceit more public, and the anger even more intense as city citizens are publicly pitted against county.
Of course, cities like Lexington now spend taxpayer dollars to promote and lobby for forced annexations, but this bill would expand an already unfair system where the annexation victims have to spend their own money to oppose more tax-funded propaganda and attorneys.
It is obvious that Hugh Holliman is trying to fool the citizens so that he can later claim that he “tried” to help us. He seems to believe that we are all naive. This bill will not help those of us who are being annexed now, because it is not retroactive, and it will never be passed anyway and Holliman knows it.
ó Keith Bost
Sapona