Monday, March 11, 2013

H264 Would Eliminate Protected Buffers Around Towns/Cities

The bill introduced in the NC House to amend the state's constitution to make annexation by our cities virtually impossible also contains a clause that would simply eliminate extra-territorial jurisdictions (ETJ), those zones immediately surrounding cities where development and building regs are applied and exercised by the municipalities.

Apparently, the House sponsors of this attempt to strangle the life out of our towns and cities is not enough, or not fast enough, because now there's a separate bill (H264) that would eliminate ETJs right now and by statute.

The Republican sponsors of this particular law are no slouches at misdirection. They named H264 "Justice for Rural Citizens Act." We guess that "Screw You, Cities" was a little too obvious.

Those citizens of Boone's ETJ, along with the citizens in dozens of other ETJs across the state, people who have grown accustomed to the protections against asphalt plants and other intrusive and disruptive developments in their neighborhoods, might want to be following all these radical actions in Raleigh.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Bill is aptly named as it would prohibit the control of people that are disenfranchised from voting for or running for office in the governmental bodies that make laws effecting them and their property.

Anonymous said...

Folks, we need to need to active in hurry. If you live in an ETJ area, your zoning protection could be gone very soon.

This isn't rural versus urban, this is industry and big developers vs family neighborhoods.

Call and write everyone that you can and let the know why this is important zoning protection for high growth areas like Boone.

Anonymous said...

End the ETJs. Control of someone's property by government officials they cannot vote for is unconstitutional and immoral.

The ETJ residents are county residents and should be under county jurisdiction.

Anonymous said...

ETJ's should be to protect the town's interests in property they intend to annex. If they don't annex within a reasonable period of time, the ETJ should be eliminated.

An alternative would be to let ETJ residents vote in town elections.