IT’S NOT OFTEN that people who don’t work in city government talk about the need to change South Carolina’s antiquated annexation laws. But Cayce’s sudden decision to annex a Richland County flood plain for what looks like a revival of the defunct Green Diamond has created that conversation, led by environmentalists.
While their proposals to make annexation more transparent seem reasonable, their larger concern is misplaced. Our problem isn’t that it’s too easy for municipalities to expand. It’s that it’s far too difficult: At least 75 percent of property owners must agree to be annexed, either by petition or in a public referendum.
As a result, while South Carolina shook off its rural roots and became largely urban and suburban in the past half-century, you wouldn’t know it by looking at Census data: The portion of our population that actually lives inside an incorporated municipality increased just 1 point from 1950 to 2004, from 35 to 36 percent.
That’s because people didn’t flock to our cities — which for the most part don’t have much room inside their boundaries for more people. They came to our metropolitan areas. They came for the same reasons that those inside the cities came: That’s where the jobs are; it’s where the cultural amenities and the shopping and the good schools and the neighborhoods are.
Problem is, the non-city-dwellers do little to foot the bill for the added police and fire protection at their jobs, for the amenities that cities provide. On top of that, they demand municipal-style services from their counties.
So the actual city residents have to pay higher taxes to support their outside-the-city-limits neighbors, or else settle for a lower level of services themselves. And non-urban county residents have to pay higher taxes for the garbage collection and parks and other services they neither want nor need.
The most absurd manifestations of our anti-annexation laws are the “doughnut holes” — tiny little areas surrounded on all sides by a city. Often the residents don’t realize that they aren’t in the city — until they call the police and are told to call the sheriff.
Our annexation laws are a microcosm of a larger problem — a legislative tradition that is hostile to local government. Just as the Legislature keeps the executive branch of state government weak by dividing its power among nine elected officers and dozens of part-time boards, it keeps local governments weak by limiting or dividing up their powers. It hamstrings counties by maintaining some 500 special-purpose districts — separate, redundant little governments, often controlled by legislators, that provide sewer service or parks or any number of other services that should be provided by the county or, better still, by a city whose boundaries match the urban population that wants those services.
But a good first step to correcting this pathology is reforming our annexation laws — to lower the number of property owners who must support annexation, to lower it even more in the case of doughnut holes or even to move to the more rational North Carolina approach, which makes annexation automatic when a population reaches an “urban density.” In addition to strengthening our cities, that would reduce the political clout of the special-purpose districts, which would make it easier to give county councils control of the counties, which would lower the cost of government and give legislators more time to concentrate on running the state — which is, after all, what we elected them to do.