Less than a year afterNorth Carolina’s Republican-led legislature corrected the state’s involuntary annexation rules to uphold the ights of property owners, aWakeCountyjudge has single-handedly returned a freedom-robbing power to local governments.
Judge Shannon Joseph on Tuesday struck down the state’s new way for property owners in unincorporated areas to block forced annexation. Unless the ruling is overturned on appeal, it’s a return to the same old-same old whereby cities and towns can expand municipal limits to increase their tax base and require property owners to live by zoning rules whether they want to or not.
That flies in the face of individual liberty and the very core of what it means to live inAmerica.
When the Legislature overhauled state annexation laws last year, property rights won a huge victory, one that came a little late for some Burlington residents, but a victory nonetheless.
The new rules said that a proposed involuntary annexation could be stopped if 60 percent of landowners in the targeted area signed a petition opposing it. Property owners had about four months to get the required signatures, a reasonable amount of time, and municipalities were barred from attempting the same involuntary annexation for three years.
Areas aroundLexington,KinstonandFayettevillealready have used the 60-percent rule to halt annexations. In other areas, cases were pending when Joseph dropped her hammer. Without further legal action to stop them, these municipalities can get back to the business of sucking up property to refill their dwindling coffers and enforce their uninvited bureaucratic rules.
As communities grow, new construction — with higher property value — takes place around the outer edges of cities and towns. Older property declines in value, so the taxes municipalities collect decline, too. An easy fix has been to go after new neighborhoods with higher-valued homes so government can keep financing programs.
Elected officials and government employees will argue that these programs benefit the less-fortunate and improve “quality of life” for cities and towns.
In fact, imposing a tax on unwilling residents amounts to nothing more than income redistribution — taking what one person has earned and giving it to those who have done nothing to receive it.
And the laws — zoning is a prime example — that come with living inside municipal limits amount to forcing one person’s will on another.
In 1776,America’s forbearers went to war to keep a government from exerting force on individuals who had no voice in determining what rules applied to their lives. Involuntary annexation is the contemporary equivalent. Individual property owners are forced to accept rules and pay taxes to a government they had no voice in choosing — and do not want to choose.
In 2011, the North Carolina Legislature took a much-needed step in setting up a legal means for property owners to decide whether they would choose to accept the rules of a local government. Joseph turned freedom and individual liberty upside down with her recent ruling.
The residents involved in this case, joined by the Attorney General who sided with them, would do well to fight another day, appeal the ruling and give a higher court the opportunity to right this wrong.
(TheTimesNews.com)
2012-03-30 19:20:13
