Rebel yell - annexation programs in Tennessee

Reason, June, 1998 by Jesse Walker

Tennesseeans fight back against the conquering cities

Most city officials in America, whatever their political party, share certain fundamental beliefs. They believe they have a right to annex any outlying area with an appealing tax base, then take their time delivering the services those taxes are supposed to pay for. And they believe they have a right to grab any parcel for which they might have a use - to seize a future landfill site, for example, before subjecting it to eminent domain. They rarely have trouble doing any of this, since state laws on annexation are usually written by people with the same beliefs.

But last year in Tennessee, the world turned upside down; the balance of power swung away from city leaders and toward residents of the areas they covet. For a few months, Tennesseans glimpsed the political order under which people actually want to live. It's somewhat different from the one officials have been imposing.

The story began in Fayette County, in the western part of the state. In 1996, the town of Oakland decided to annex a strip of highway that cut straight through the tiny rural community of Hickory Withe, splitting the latter in half. The people of Hickory Withe had no say in the matter: By Tennessee law, cities can take over any area within three miles of their borders (five miles if the city is as big as Chattanooga). All it takes is a vote of the conquering government. Tennessee is one of six states in which the people being annexed need not be consulted. If the annexees don't like it, their only recourse is to move - or fight it out in the courts, a lengthy and sometimes prohibitively expensive process.

But it so happens that Tennessee, s lieutenant governor, John Wilder, comes from Fayette County. He was sympathetic to Hickory Withe's troubles and decided to help. Oakland wouldn't be able to annex any of Hickory Withe if the latter were itself incorporated. But it was too small (under Tennessee law, you need at least 1,500 citizens to incorporate) and too close to Oakland (new towns must be at least three miles from other municipalities). So Wilder sponsored a bill that would have made an exception for his former neighbors.

When it looked like that law would be too narrow to pass constitutional muster, Wilson drafted a new version that made it easier for any community to incorporate.

The new bill reduced the minimum number of citizens needed to start a town from 1,500 to 225. It also got rid of the rules restricting how close a new town could be to an existing municipality. On top of that, it gave new incorporations priority over annexation attempts. The new arrangement would last only a year, giving Hickory Withe time to incorporate without permanently tipping the balance of power away from cities.

The law passed quietly, entering the books in early 1997 under the bland name Public Chapter 98. If their later protests are to be believed, many legislators didn't even realize what they had voted for.

But the Tennessee Municipal League, the cities' lobbying arm, knew what the change meant: trouble. If word got out, it would be easy for rural and suburban communities to protect themselves against future annexations. On the other hand, the press hadn't paid any attention to the reforms, and the people who'd benefit weren't the kind of folks who kept up with such things. The Municipal League decided to keep quiet and wait for the law to expire.

That seemed like a good strategy, until lawyer Gordon Olswing overheard a Municipal League lobbyist fretting over Chapter 98 at a cocktail party. Word got out, and suddenly every Tom, Dick, and 223-plus Harrys was queueing up to start a new town. More than a dozen communities in Shelby County filed for incorporation, lest they be swallowed by nearby Memphis.

That city has a long history of annexing outlying neighborhoods, sucking up their taxes and then short-changing them on services. Local journalist Chris Lawrence, curator of the Memphis Watch Web site, offers two examples: "The recent annexation of the Wolfchase Galleria area has reduced police coverage to one police car per shift; the area's fire coverage is two Memphis firefighters in a pickup track followed by a county crew to do the actual work." Furthermore, the Memphis schools are in the bottom third of the country; the county system is in the top third.

Not surprisingly, Shelby County residents jumped at the chance to ward off their hungry neighbor - and, sometimes, to ward off each other. After a collection of communities filed to incorporate as the city of New Forest Hills, part of the proposed city - Aintree Farms, a subdivision of about 300 people - declared that it would rather be a town of its own.

Because Memphis is poor and predominantly black, some city officials have argued that the incorporationists are nothing more than white-flight refugees shielding themselves from the Negro hordes. The thing is, a lot of the suburbanites are black. Hickory Hill, a particularly noisy independence-minded suburb, is 40 percent African-American; had it succeeded in incorporating, its school system would have been 60 percent black.