An issue that I’ve been harping on for some time is annexations and incorporations.  A number of communities over the past couple of years have been hotbeds for this (Erda, Providence, Hideout, Herriman/Olympia Hills, West Weber, and on and on). As I’ve generously pointed out, our annexation/incorporation codes are a mess and sorely in need of considerable revision, if not just  complete recodification (see my post from Nov. 24 and Dec. 31 for more).

This year’s legislative session saw very little action on annexations/incorporations.  A short provision in HB303, the land use task force bill, added a limitation on who has standing to challenge a proposed annexation in the courts.  That’s a far cry from the last couple of years in the legislature, where a number of bills were mooted to deal with various aspects of the annexation problems.

As our population continues to grow, it is clear that new areas for development will eventually be needed.  For many communities, those areas often lie outside existing city boundaries, in unincorporated county areas.  Such expansion raises many issues that need to be dealt with – expanding utilities and services, status of agricultural and open lands, public sentiment about new growth, and the need to accommodate future citizens.  In many states, community master (general) plans are required to consider annexation policies as strategies for future growth.  In Utah, municipalities are required by state code to have annexation policy plan, recommended by the Planning Commission and adopted by the elected officials, if they desire to annex land in future.  Because of its close relationship to future growth and community character, perhaps this plan ought to be part of the general plan (that’s one issue!).

Annexations and incorporations are often by their very nature highly contentious and controversial, between cities and counties, between cities and other cities, between residents in the county and cities, between property owners/developers and everybody else, and so on.  As often seems to be the case, these fights end up in the legislature when someone doesn’t like the way things are going.  And legislators, by their nature, often respond to one side or the other without taking a careful, comprehensive look at the issues involved.  It’s been this way for many years, and the result has been back and forth amendments to state code.  The code itself is now, as a result, full of contradictions and inconsistencies.

All this became ever more apparent to me in the last few weeks.  I reluctantly agreed recently to allow myself to be appointed to the Davis County Local Boundary Commission, a mechanism provided for in state code to try to resolve formal protests to proposed annexations.  In our case, there was such a protest by Clinton City and several property owners to an annexation petition being considered for adoption by West Point City.  I won’t go into the details of this particular case, but I will point out that we members of the Boundary Commission found the state code full of said inconsistencies and contradictions.  The main one has to do with the ability of owners of “rural real property” to challenge proposed annexations and have their property excluded.  I recall when these provisions relating to rural real property were amended into the state code a few years ago.  Much of it had to do with a popular push going on at the time to preserve agriculture (it also had to do with keeping certain large mining company lands from being annexed as well, but I digress).  A number of things were proposed, including the idea that established agriculture protection areas were excluded from being able to be annexed unless the owners consented.  But along with that, a provision was inserted that allowed all owners of “rural real property” to be able to exclude themselves from annexation.  What this did, in essence, was give a single property owner the ability to stymie an otherwise reasonable proposal to bring a newly developing area into a municipality.   The definition of rural real property was inexact enough that just about any unincorporated property zoned agricultural could qualify, and with no minimum size specified, even such that single small property owners could exclude themselves.  Such a situation was a dramatic change from long-standing annexation practice, which sometimes means that a few unwilling property owners are forced into an annexation to accommodate reasonable proposals to expand municipal boundaries (rarely do all rural property owners want to be annexed into a neighboring municipality – if such a situation were allowed to stand, orderly growth would be a near impossibility).  But such is the situation that was created with that amendment for rural real property.

Given the language in the state code, our boundary commission had little choice but to invalidate the proposed annexation petition because it did not comply with the provisions of state code (there were a couple of other reasons as well, also to do with contradictory language in the code). Given what we were seeing, it was difficult for us to think how anything but annexations of single properties (or small groups of consenting property owners) directly adjacent to current city boundaries, could ever be annexed in the future, and maybe not even those because of other language in the code.  It’s a dire situation.

I understand there has already been concern expressed by important legislators that this situation needs to be addressed (rural real property), and I would agree it does.  But in reality, the entire code needs to be addressed.  I also understand, however, that this would likely be a significant task with many stakeholders, and there probably just isn’t much appetite to do that right now.  Last year, Rep. Steve Waldrip tried to take on some annexation issues, saw the need for recodification, started down that road, and then quickly gave it up when the scale of the task became apparent.

We are spending a lot of energy right now talking about rapid growth in our state, what it is doing to our quality of life, and how to deal with it.  Funding was approved by the legislature this year for a couple of initiatives to talk, in one case with citizens, and in another with local policy makers and developers, about growth issues and what to do.  Annexations/incorporations is one that is critical to future growth of our communities, and should not be ignored.