By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost
RALEIGH ó Opponents of North Carolina’s involuntary annexation law won a big victory Thursday when a study commission recommended citizens within a targeted area be allowed to vote the annexation up or down.
“It’s a start, a very, very good start,” said Rep. Fred Steen, R-Rowan, who belonged to the Joint Legislative Commission on Municipal Annexation and voted for the recommendation.
“(But) I think we’ve still got an uphill battle.”
The recommendation and 12 others will be drafted as bills and introduced in the 2009-10 session of the General Assembly, which opens next week.
Among the other recommendations is a call for the Legislature to place a moratorium on annexations until the current laws are revised.
“Those were two big issues,” Rowan County Commissioner Tina Hall, also a member of the study commission, said of the vote and moratorium decisions. She joined Steen in voting for both of the those recommendations.
“It’s out of our hands,” Hall said, “but I feel good about it. … There’s no doubt that the citizens’ input has made a difference.”
The commission voted 14-6 to allow citizens of a proposed involuntary annexation area the right to vote for or against it. Municipal officials argue that cities’ growth would be stifled by such a provision.
The recommendation for a moratorium passed by a 12-8 vote.
Once again, close to 50 people who belong to Good Neighbors of Rowan County traveled from Salisbury by chartered bus to attend the study commission’s meeting in Raleigh.
Most of the citizens wore bright red T-shirts, their personal stop-sign symbols against forced annexation.
Steen said what the Rowan citizens and other annexation opponents in the state accomplished over the past year represented true grass-roots democracy at work.
“I really don’t think it would have happened without them here,” Steen said.
The Good Neighbors group formed in 2008 to fight successfully an involuntary annexation attempt by the city of Salisbury for an area along the N.C. 150 corridor.
Encouraged by the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, the Good Neighbors group then joined others in the state who were fighting the 50-year-old annexation law in North Carolina.
Carl Ford, chairman of the Rowan County commissioners, attended Thursday’s meeting in Raleigh, as did former Rowan County Commissioners Arnold Chamberlain and Jim Sides and state Rep. Lorene Coates, D-Rowan.
“The bottom line is, the people want to vote ó by majority petition or at the ballot box,” Ford said.
Sides has made impassioned speeches against the involuntary annexation law at numerous public forums, including the commission’s public hearing earlier this month.
“I’m always encouraged when something new happens, and this is historic,” Sides said of the commission’s recommendations Thursday. “… Sooner or later, change is coming.”
Though opponents made significant headway Thursday, they tempered their enthusiasm, knowing the recommendations now have to go through both chambers of the General Assembly.
Sides said all he asks of legislative leaders is to let the system work. “Don’t kill it in committee,” he said.
Sen. Tony Rand, D-Cumberland, could be one of the roadblocks for the annexation opponents. Because Fayetteville was exempted from the state’s involuntary annexation law until 1987, it created tremendous growth problems for the city, Rand said Thursday.
“It held Fayetteville back in so many ways,” Rand said. The city suffered from inadequate sales tax reimbursements and how it was viewed by other areas, he recalled. “As someone who has lived through it and seen it,” Rand added, cities will suffer without the involuntary annexation law.
Charlotte City Attorney Mac McCarley often found himself stating the N.C. League of Municipalities’ position through the two-hour-plus meeting. He said North Carolina is not a referendum state, and annexation did not rise to the level of being a referendum issue.
Changing the crux of the law and granting citizens within a proposed annexation area the right to vote would be a huge mistake and force the issue back to the General Assembly, McCarley predicted.
McCarley reminded the study commission that the League of Municipalities submitted 20 position points related to the law, which he acknowledged has been abused by cities on a few occasions.
“(But) what you hear are isolated horror stories,” McCarley said. The “vast majority” of municipalities have used the statute appropriately. He also described the moratorium as a bad idea.
Hall, the Rowan commissioner, said she disagreed with McCarley’s characterization of the problem as “just a few bad apples.” The state has an outdated law, which has fostered multiple abuses and led to overcrowded rooms where people are crying for change, Hall said.
Doug Aitken, who represents the Fair Annexation Coalition of West End, said the study commission wouldn’t have been meeting Thursday if the Legislature did not think there were problems with involuntary annexation.
Rep. Nelson Dollar, R-Wake, said municipal governments hold all the chips with the way the law is written now. Property owners have no voice, and most other states give citizens more leverage, he said.
Fletcher resident Ben Campen, a member of the study commission, said cities could still expand through voluntary annexations that would demand good planning. But on involuntary annexations, citizens want the most precious thing government can give them ó a vote, he said.
Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, argued several times that the annexation issue is “uniquely different” for larger cities, and he suggested that larger ones ó specifically Greensboro and Charlotte ó be exempt from requiring a vote in forced annexations.
It is citizens who live outside mid-sized and small municipalities, such as Salisbury, who are opposing forced annexation, Jones said.
“Our objective all along has been to comply with the laws the General Assembly gives to us,” said Salisbury Planning Director Joe Morris, who attended the study commission’s meeting.
Morris described many of the recommendations to emerge Thursday as general and open-ended. Many technicalities will have to be ironed out in the bill-drafting, and some provisions could face a constitutional test, he said.
“I’m not sure how much of that will make it to the floor of either house,” Morris said. “There are a lot of issues that were unresolved today.”
Morris said the moratorium recommendation is not clear as to whether it would also take in voluntary annexations. Salisbury has the voluntary annexation of much of the Rowan-Cabarrus Community College campus scheduled to take effect Feb. 3.
As for the voting question, Morris expressed concern that it precludes citizens already living within a city of having a say about their future growth. Depending on how an annexation unfolds, it could lead to a small number of households controlling the growth of a city of many thousands of people, Morris said.
“I guess that would become minority rule,” he added.