In July,
I explained that the creation of a new House-Senate annexation
commission was a complete disaster for annexation reform.  Those
who supported
the study bill creating this commission sabotaged annexation reform for
the year. 

There was a House committee that already had been
meeting and promised to finish its work.  It could have finished
its work by the end of 2008.  Instead, their work was effectively
killed by the creation of this joint study committee that has never met.

This is what I wrote:

“This commission will have way too little
time to meet and come up with any meaningful recommendations before the
2009 session.  The commission expires at the start of the next
legislative session or earlier.  There will be excuses like there
are elections, holidays, etc so it is hard to meet.  The language
is drafted in a way so that it may never meet (which would be
good).” 

“The problem is the passage of this commission
language will be the excuse for the House Select Committee, which was a
fair committee, from doing any more work.  It also had already
done a lot of preliminary work so a final report with recommendations
was likely by the end of the year.”

“…To sum up, this new commission was formed so that it could replace the one commission that actually would have been fair.”

This House-Senate commission still hasn’t met yet.  It was
supposed to finally meet on October 22nd, but that meeting was just
cancelled.  Its first meeting was going to be listening to David
Lawrence from UNC give his annexation overview which the House
committee already heard–the joint commission would have to start from
scratch.

It would be good if this commission doesn’t meet.  The anti-property rights Senate would
simply undermine any real recommendations.  Senator Basnight
had the audacity to appoint Senator Rand to this joint commission–the
same person who single-handledly killed the moratorium bill.

Efforts to push study committees
and moratoria were/are a waste of time.  If annexation reform is
the goal, then proponents need to push real reform instead of
sidetracking themselves with efforts that don’t achieve any reform yet
require the same level of blood, sweat, and tears.