GAINESVILLE – Hall County Administrator Jock Connell is well aware that several of the municipalities in Hall County have enjoyed continued strong growth, and that their city limits have been expanding as they prosper.
Commercial investment continues to pour into those areas because developers oftentimes want to be part of an incorporated city. Additionally, families working at those new businesses want to live in a subdivision that has city sewer and water hook-up, as well as regular trash pick-up.
Because of that demand it is rare to attend a city council meeting in either Gainesville or Flowery Branch where annexation requests aren’t part of the agenda. Oakwood and Lula see their share of annexation applications, as well.
And since real estate is a zero-sum enterprise, does Hall County “mind” when part of the county leaves its exclusive control and becomes part of an incorporated jurisdiction? Are there restrictions? What is the process?
Connell shared a few of his thoughts on the topic after Monday afternoon’s Hall County Commission work session.
“Sometimes annexations can be really good,” Connell began. “You’ve got a piece of property that might be an island (surrounded on all sides by a city); it might be a remnant; that probably makes sense to be annexed into a city.”
“And there is a process for that,” Connell said. “There is also a process if we choose to object.”
“We take a look at every single annexation that comes in,” Connell said. “Is it consistent with our land use plan? We look at it for consistency and we provide comments back.”
“I would say 95% of them we don’t have much issue with,” he estimated. “And we typically respond back and say we don’t have a problem with it.”
“But we can object to an annexation…and depending on far it goes there could be boards that hear it and that type of thing,” Connell said. “We don’t get that far very often at all.”
And the fact that annexed properties are leaving county control and are going over to city administration can have a financial effect on the county.
“Let’s say you’re (annexed into) a city that has its own park system, we would not tax them for parks because they would have their own millage rate for that,” Connell explained.
Gainesville has its own park system and fits Connell’s example well. Property annexed into the City of Gainesville stops paying ad valorem and property taxes to support county parks and begins paying those funds to the city instead.
That might sound equitable, but those lost tax revenues need to be made up elsewhere.
The same concept applies to fire service funds, public safety funding (Flowery Branch, Oakwood and Gainesville all have their own separate police departments), community center costs and other infrastructure.
And the situation trickles down into school systems. Officials with Hall County Schools have said that some of the older schools in their system probably would not be located where they are now if they were built today because city limits have inched into the county school’s district.
“One of the most obvious things is fire stations,” Connell said. “You’ve got Hall County Fire Services and you’ve got Gainesville Fire services, and we’ve begun talking with the city more closely in recent years about: where they’re going to put a station we want to think long and hard about where we’re going to put a station. We don’t want to put them side by side.”
Connell said whenever the county decides to invest in new infrastructure and other capital items: “We want to make sure that we understand what the population trends are, what we expect growth trends to be, because we don’t want to put one down and then five years down the road it’s inconsistent with where we want to be.”
A generation ago there was some limited discussion about consolidating city and county operations but that idea never got much traction, and Connell says he has not heard any serious discussion of it lately.
