The legislature passed a new study bill.
Section 46 of the bill creates a new joint commission on
annexation.  The commission may or may not have citizens on it–it
has 12 members appointed by Hackney, 12 members appointed by Basnight,
2
League reps, and 2 county association reps.  The membership almost
certainly will be skewed against annexation reform supporters.

As of now, it is not clear who just devastated the annexation reform movement.

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.

That committee was on record promising that
it would meet again before next year.  It likely would have
produced a fair report.   It won’t even matter if the new
Commission is never formed–its possible existence will be the excuse
for the House Select Committee to never meet again.

The vote on this bill is still not available–anyone who voted for this
study bill just slammed annexation reform (I don’t care that there were
other studies in the bill).  As far as I know (still checking)
nobody introduced an amendment to take this study commission out of the
bill.

The only real hope is that the select committee will meet anyway–don’t
bet on it.  A not so real hope is that this new commission
actually turns out a fair report by the end of the year–especially
don’t bet on that.

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

This is a disaster for annexation reform.

League wins again and is running up the score!