SNCA Update January 25, 2009
 

The very first recommendation, which on the surface seems to address the "meaningful oversight" that the people were requesting, is to have the Local Government Commission (LGC) review city initiated annexations.
(Wow, the alarm bells were going off in my mind immediately.) Let's look at the make-up of the LGC.

The LGC was created to oversee the balance sheets and borrowing of the local governments. They have done that well. Giving them the task of reviewing municipal annexations without any guidelines to determine whether the annexation should be approved will probably be beyond the Commission's ability. In fact, it is very likely to end up with similar results to what we have already seen when the LGC was given the task of approving Tax Increment Financing (TIF) projects. The Roanoke Rapids Randy Parton Theater project was the very first TIF project that was given the green light by the LGC. That turned out to be a model of everything that could go wrong with a TIF project.

We need to take a look at just who are the decision making members of the Local Government Commission.
I'll give that information to you straight and let you decide how this is going to work out for the two parties involved in a city initiated annexation.

http://www.greensboronc.gov/departments/finance1/LocalGovernmentCommission.htm

"The Local Government Commission is composed of nine members: the State Treasurer, the Secretary of State, the State Auditor, the Secretary of Revenue, and five others by appointment. The State Treasurer serves as Chairman and selects the Secretary of the Commission, who heads the administrative staff serving the Commission.

A major function of the Commission is the approval, sale, and delivery of substantially all North Carolina local government bonds and notes. A second key function is monitoring certain fiscal and accounting standards prescribed for units of local government...."

LGC MEMBERS: (The five "others")

Patrick Smathers

• Mayor of Canton, NC
• Attorney; Governmental Law  
• 2nd Vice Chairman, Region A, Southwestern Planning Commission
• Ex-offico, Economic Development Commission

Mr. W. Calvin Horton

• Chapel Hill Town Manager - retired 2008
• Board Member - International City/County Management Association
• Board Member (past) – Chamber

Irving Joyner NCCU School of Law Professor – NAACP legal consultant

Allen Joines – Mayor of Winston Salem

• Joines had served as deputy assistant city manager
• Marvin Collins Distinguished Leadership Award from the North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association 
• Past Board member of the N.C. League of Municipalities and is the Chairman of the N.C. Metropolitan Coalition, made up of the 25 largest cities in North Carolina.

John H. Zollicoffer, Jr.

• Henderson City Attorney, Municipal Law Atty

 According to comments during the Joint Commission discussion of the LGC as the oversight body, this recommendation is supposed to be better than having the County Commissioners act as the third party in city initiated annexations. Someone claimed that the LGC would be less biased and more objective in representing the best interests of the affected property owners. (Who could say that with a straight face?)

The five appointed members on the LGC consists of lawyers, city bureaucrats, and unabashed associates/members of the North Carolina League of Municipalities (NCLM).

So the idea of LGC oversight was to address two of the areas of concern: meaningful oversight and a meaningful voice for the affected property owners.
This recommendation gets an F- on fulfilling those needed reform areas.

After researching the membership of the LGC, I then went through the remaining recommendations that the commission waded through before voting on whether to recommend a moratorium or a referendum. 

You can read all of the amendments that were proposed on the agenda by downloading the document: http://www.stopncannexation.com/Joint_Commission_Recomendations.pdf

The recommendations from the Joint Commission sheet were cross referenced with the "20 point recommendations" that the NCLM presented to the Joint Commission at the December 17th meeting.

Six out of the eleven recommendations that actually passed out of the meeting for recommendations to the General Assembly were taken from the NCLM recommendations either unchanged or with slight alteration. 

Six out of the eleven are just tweaks to certain areas of the law that will not significantly change the problems that we have with the laws that has caused the ongoing discontent since the laws were enacted, came to a head and brought us to where we are today.

The commission recommendations give us:

• A very minor change to how the annexation victims are notified of their impending fate. (NCLM #2)
• A minor adjustment to how we pay for those services that we never wanted or needed. (NCLM #12)
• A minor adjustment to the density standard used to qualify the next victims of municipal takeover. 
• Minor adjustments to make it harder for cities to use "shoestring" or strips of land to take in areas. (NCLM #15 & 16)
• A minor adjustment to recourse with the LGC if services are not fully provided. 
• An additional protection for large working farms from city regulation if the farm is annexed. (Shouldn't it be absurd that large working farms can be annexed in the first place?)
• A lower threshold of necessary agreement in a low income area to petition for annexation. (NCLM # 19 & 20)